Slattery, Left Field, New York, from the series Old Judge Cigarettes 1888

Curator: This is a piece titled "Slattery, Left Field, New York," originating from the "Old Judge Cigarettes" series, created in 1888 by Goodwin & Company. It's an albumen print, now held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Editor: What a sepia dream! The baseball player looks so earnest, like he's about to release a prayer instead of a fastball. It's like looking at a memory, faded and soft around the edges. Curator: Precisely. Consider the function: it was produced as a promotional item. These cards, printed on albumen paper, were inserted into cigarette packs as a marketing strategy, a collectable offering an image of health and virility juxtaposed with a known carcinogen. Editor: That's deliciously dark, isn't it? So, beauty and commerce shaking hands in the grim business of addiction. I am stuck on his gloves and high laced shoes, all covered in dirt. He could be preparing the ground as easily as stepping up to the plate. Curator: Note also how this genre scene collapses photographic realism with staged studio backdrops. It offers a fascinating perspective into the evolving social contexts surrounding early professional baseball and its commodification. It is meant to be widely reproduced, traded, consumed, and eventually discarded. Editor: But now it hangs in the Met, rescued from oblivion. I love the oddness of it—that backdrop feels almost Impressionistic. It feels at odds with the staged shot of the player himself. It almost gives me a dreamy, melancholy mood. He's caught between the real and the ideal. Curator: Which, you might argue, reflects its historical moment. This form of popular media highlights a nascent era of baseball’s professionalization while simultaneously documenting 19th-century production and marketing mechanisms of modernity itself. Editor: Yes, so much of history bound up in a little sepia rectangle. It makes me wonder about Slattery himself, though, doesn’t it? What was his story? Did he ever imagine his face would end up on a museum wall, rescued from a pack of smokes? Curator: Exactly. The layers of production, from player to product to art object, complicate simple narratives of artistry or even sport, demonstrating complex social and material relationships. Editor: Absolutely. Makes you consider how we transform ephemera into treasures and imbue them with all this meaning. Curator: Indeed, it's quite compelling how mass-produced cultural objects can ultimately hold such depth when analyzed with an eye towards their own historical production processes.