Created a tarot deck based on photos I took of my family members as well as traditional tarot card imagery.

About the Project

There’s a certain mystique and magic surrounding fortune telling but predicting the future, well that sounds pretty cool. My story for this project is told through pictures of my family representing the 22 Major Arcana of the Tarot Card deck.

Project Goals

The goal of this project was to create a “book” of some sort. It was necessary that the photography tell a story of some sort. I decided to illustrate this story with photos of my family members in the context of the Major Arcana of the Tarot Cards. I wanted to show mundane people, my family, in the magical and arcane context of the tarot cards in order to contrast the two.

Final Tarot Cards

Tarot Card Process Work

The Tarot cards, at least the 22 Major Arcana, are described as the parts of a journey. The journey begins with the fool, the first card numbered zero, or Nulla.
In this journey, and in the cards, I am the Fool.

“In many esoteric systems of interpretation, too, the Fool is usually interpreted as the protagonist of a story, and the Major Arcana is the path the Fool takes through the great mysteries of life and the main human archetypes. This path is known traditionally in cartomancy as the "Fool's Journey", and is frequently used to introduce the meaning of Major Arcana cards to beginners.”

My journey started with research on the Major Arcana. These 22 cards each have their own set of traditional imagery, based on the Rider-Waite Tarot card deck, and have various meaning depending on how the card is drawn.

Based on my research of the meaning and symbolism of the cards, I set up a plan for which of my family members would represent which cards, as well as ideas as to what mundane objects might be incorporated into the photos for their cards.

After this planning as well as several trips, the highlight of which was forgetting my camera’s SD card while going to photograph my grandpa and only realizing this after my mother and I arrived to see him, I had completed 22 photographs of myself and my parents, siblings, aunts, uncles and cousins.