I started the project Mountain Dream Tarot in 1970
because I had a dream to do it
I literally dreamed it up
Its almost impossible for young people
to imagine a world without Photoshop
But if something was on fire in a card, it was on fire
And if you needed an eagle, you had to find an eagle
Or a lion
Or swords
I had to round up some swords
I mean, I couldnt just make this stuff up;
I had to photograph it
We have eight wands flying through the sky, for example
Thats the same wand
Its a stick, basically, that I photographed once
on a piece of white paper
Which meant I exposed it eight times in sort
of progression;
and then process that one photograph,
and that one wand would appear eight times
I was using friends as models,
because I was in an art colony at Penland School
in North Carolina
Sometimes I would pick a model out,
thinking physically they just looked good for the part,
and and not realize that somehow
there was something going on in their life that
was really true
For example, the card of death
I wanted someone with a particular cheekbone structure
And I asked a manhe was a little older than I was,
but still a youngish manif he would mind modeling
And I could tell, whoa, you know, he really doesnt want
to do this
So I dropped it
And I found out later
that he thought he was terminally ill
And so my asking him to be the death card
was really alarming
Another instance happened with the ten of swords,
where theres a man lying face down and hes got swords
in his back
And its a gruesome kind of murder
And when I processed it, and I threw it in the fixer,
and the doorbell rang
It was the little girl from across the street
She said, Bea, did you hear the cops?
Did you hear the ambulance?
I said, No
And she said, Well, someone was just shot dead
in your front yard
It was a drive-by shooting, and this was a fairly calm,
suburban Philadelphia neighborhood
Nothing like that had happened before or since
But it was that minute, that I was printing that card,
that someone was killed
On my doorstep
No, Ive never had a reading done
After some of the stories I told you, you can probably
understand why
But the main people that they sell to now
are tarot collectors
Its a completely completely different audience
Its not photographers, its not artists, necessarily
Its a theres a whole world out there
And with that I dont mean no disrespect, but
the orders that come in,
I immediately know, without even reading them,
that theyre for tarot cards,
because of the email addresses
Itd be something like crystalpony or motherearth@Google
or, you know, whatever
Its like, okay, this is a tarot order, I can tell
One of the reasons its followed me for all these years,
is historically, as far as we know,
it was the first complete
photographic tarot deck ever done
Therefore, its really quite amazingly
important historically
A lot of them are family and friends
But theyre real people;
theyre not drawn people