Essay:Polaroid Tarot

Doing a tarot reading with polaroid photographs instead of cards worked surprisingly well. A friend of mine takes many such photos and has a big pile, mostly of people and places significant to our social group.

Hence much "local" symbology in each picture, the relationship between the pictures and also the background to some of the pictures, if known, such as when, where and why it was taken.

Some people feel that this idea uses too specific pictures and loses the general archetypical nature of the traditional cards.

Another interesting project would be to create a deck intentionally, using photographs. These could be posed, but it would be cool to carry a camera and a notebook around with you and snap things which you thought were evocative of certain concepts, to you. Maybe following the traditional cards, maybe not.

You could just use photographs in all the same ways as Tarot cards, not limited to tarot readings but meditation too, but I suspect it'd be better to use scenes without pictures of people you know.