Eliot Shepard, who runs the acclaimed photoblog Slower.net, has come up with an absolutely brilliant idea: a flickr group dedicated to the art of Pre-1990 Sports Card Portraiture.

So often, we miss what is right in front of us; I looked at baseball cards throughout my youth without registering them as photographic objects. Perhaps that was due to their ubiquity or to my age; or, perhaps, I’m not “slower,” only slow.

Good photographs often perform a defamiliarizing function: they make the things we know seem strange and uncanny. And therein lies the wonder of Eliot’s idea: once you consider the commercial portraits on baseball cards as art, you’ll never see them the same way again.

If you have some cards lying around, I encourage you to take them out and view them with new eyes. From the wild hairstyles to the unkempt mustaches to the sometimes penetrating stares of the players, old sports cards offer a veritable treasure trove of overlooked pop-culture art.

Here is my first contribution to the group:

. . . and here is a set of all the cards I’ve uploaded.

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