2025
Collage, illustration
Deck and book
Self-initiated

The Cutout Deck

A tarot deck is seventy-eight pictures that have to mean something before anyone reads a word about them. This one throws out the drawing and cuts all seventy-eight from photographs - then ships the book that most decks leave out.

The film Fifty seconds, with sound

Everybody reprints 1909

Almost every tarot deck on sale is a redraw of the same original: the Rider-Waite illustrations of 1909. That is not laziness. The imagery is the shared language, and a deck that abandons it stops being legible to anyone who has read one before.

But the category has been solving it the same way for a century - same scenes, new illustrator, new palette - so the buyer ends up choosing on style alone, and the reader gets pictures built from references that stopped being common a hundred years ago. The structure is worth keeping. The drawing is not the only way to carry it.

Several cards from the deck laid out on white, named along the foot: Strength, The Lovers, Chariot, each one a photographic collage. — Named cards Strength, The Lovers, Chariot

Cut, not drawn

Every one of the seventy-eight cards is a photographic collage: figures cut out and set into flat colour, with the object of the suit built into the scene rather than floated over it. Wands stand as red poles in a green wood. Cups are raised as trumpets and glasses over a blue sea. Swords hang on an orange wall behind a woman who has stopped looking at them. Coins arrive outsized and purple, carried in a hat across a yellow field.

The source photographs arrive in black and white. Every colour on the card - the green wood, the orange wall, the yellow field - was put there afterwards, which is exactly what lets one palette hold a whole suit together.

Photography does something the drawing cannot. The faces are real faces, caught mid-expression, so the reader recognises the situation before they identify the card - which is the order tarot is supposed to work in, and the order a redrawn deck reverses.

Colour carries the structure. Each suit keeps its own family, so a spread reads as a shape on the table before a single card is interpreted.

Collage on a green ground: two cut-out boys in caps holding a red pole between them, in a wood of red trunks above a checked green hill. — Wands Green

Collage on a blue ground: three cut-out figures in coats blowing trumpets, with orange glasses floating above them over a patterned sea. — Cups Blue

Collage on an orange ground: a woman in a rust jumper sitting on a bin, with a row of turquoise swords hanging on the wall behind her. — Swords Orange

Collage on a yellow ground: two cut-out children filling a hat and a basket with oversized purple coins, more coins hanging in the sky. — Coins Yellow

A deck to read, a book to read you

The set is two objects, and the second one is the argument. Most decks ship a folded leaflet with a line of keywords per card, which is enough to look them up and not enough to read them. Here the book is a book: a book to teach you, a book to guide you, a book to read you.

That is also what makes the collages worth the work. A deck sold on style is bought once and left in a drawer. A deck sold with the thing that teaches you to use it gets used - and the pictures have to hold up to being looked at again, which drawn keywords never do and a photograph of a real face does.

A run of cards face down across white, all showing the same dark blue geometric back pattern. — Backs Let your intuition do the talking

What it comes down to

Seventy-eight pictures, one decision, and a book that admits the deck is useless without it. The structure is the one everybody already knows. Everything on top of it was cut out by hand.

A self-initiated Bored Jar project. The deck and the book are not on sale. Every card is an original collage: the black-and-white source photographs are licensed stock, and the montage, the colour and the mapping of each card to its suit and number are the artist's own. The film opens on a card from the 1909 Rider-Waite deck, shown as the reference the concept departs from.

Design work

hello@boredjar.com