Howell, St. Louis, American League, from the White Border series (T206) for the American Tobacco Company 1909 - 1911

This baseball card of Howell from St. Louis, was made by the American Tobacco Company and it's tiny! Imagine the person who designed this, probably some guy or gal in a factory, figuring out how to squish the whole world of baseball down onto this card. Look at the way they rendered the uniform – it's like a study in subtle grays and browns. The whole thing has this soft focus, almost dreamlike quality. I bet they were thinking about how to make these guys look larger than life, heroes on and off the field. There's something so charming about the limitations of the medium; it forces you to distill everything down to its essence. It makes me think about the early days of photography and printmaking, when artists were just figuring out how to capture reality. There's a conversation happening here, across time and different forms of image-making, about how we see and remember the world.