The Lost Tarot - Hans Bauer (Indie, import, Kickstarter edition) 2022

The Lost Tarot is a labor of love. I have long had an interest in photo-based art. Once, it was my desire to create a portfolio of highly distressed, antiqued photographs depicting well-known historical personages (Attila the Hun, Julius Caesar, Joan of Arc), as if they had simply shown up at my door requesting that I make their portrait. For several reasons (the difficulty of finding suitable models and period appropriate costumes), those first attempts were unsatisfactory and, in time, I moved from Los Angeles to a rural Texas town, where I soon forgot about the project.

After several years, during which I sporadically attended a local Renaissance faire, a friend reminded me of the earlier project, and suggested that most of the heavy lifting had already been done by the wonderful characters encountered at the faire, with their fantastic costumes, armor, and period accessories. My friend further suggested I try my hand at a Tarot deck, about which I knew little at the time.

I decided to experiment with a single card, The Fool, and, if pleased with the result, would continue. To my great delight, The Fool far exceeded my expectations.

Through trial and error I was able to create a 22-card deck of Majors giving the impression of an authentic medieval tarot. Clearly, such vintage decks were already in existence, but mine would be different: The Lost Tarot would consist entirely of photographs, the idea being they were created with a crude prototype box camera nearly three and a half centuries before the actual invention of the first cameras in 1839.

In 2017, I released the 22 images of the Major Arcana + the 4 aces of the Minor Arcana first, in order to sample the public's appetite for my creation.