Two Moscow water carriers are depicted in this albumen carte-de-visite, posed in a studio setting against a plain ground with a wooden barrel as the central prop. The studio imprint on the recto reads "J. Monstein Phot.," corresponding to the Cyrillic imprint on the reverse identifying the photographer as I. Monshtein (И. Монштейн), with an address at the corner of Bolshaya Morskaya and Nevsky Prospekt, in the Kotomin building, apartment No. 63, opposite the English Shop, in St. Petersburg. The address places the card firmly in the 1860s, when Johann Monstein was active at that location producing occupational and genre studies of Russian working types.

Both men wear the characteristic working dress of the trade: dark waistcoats over collarless shirts with rolled sleeves, white aprons, and flat-brimmed caps. The man on the left grips a long wooden pole with a cross-handle, the type used to shoulder barrels, while both men turn their faces toward each other, lending the image a staged, theatrical quality. The barrel between them is iron-banded and open-topped, consistent with the standard equipment of the trade.

In nineteenth-century Russia, long before running water appeared in every home, the water carrier was as familiar and essential to the urban landscape as a cab driver or street cleaner. The vast majority of the population, from tenement dwellers to shopkeepers and artisans, received their water from water carriers' barrels, making the trade a subject of particular interest to photographers producing ethnographic series for the collector and tourist market.

The reverse bears a pencil inscription in English reading "water carriers in Moscow," as well as the printed Russian studio imprint identifying the photographer as И. Монштейнъ (I. Monshtein), located at the corner of Bolshaya Morskaya (formerly Malaya Millionnaya) and Nevsky Prospekt, Kotomin building, apartment No. 63, opposite the English Shop, St. Petersburg.