Adrian

A figure floats against a misty, abstract backdrop on every card of the Adrian Tarot, a human form rendered not in paint but in digitally edited photography. Adrian Köhli made the deck as a college project, and the archive describes the resulting tone as modern and openly sexy, closer to a fashion shoot than to tarot's usual illustrated tradition. No publisher picked it up, which fits a deck that reads more like personal work than a commercial release. That photographic approach is what makes the deck worth noting here. Tarot has mostly been an illustrated medium, painted or drawn archetypes standing in for the human figures they represent, and photography changes that relationship by putting an actual body in the frame. It suits readers curious about tarot's photographic fringe, and anyone interested in what a deck looks like when it begins as a student project rather than a publisher's commission. Readers who want painterly symbolism steeped in tradition should look elsewhere; this one is closer to an art-school experiment than to archetype.