Counterculture

William Haigwood built the CounterCulture Tarot from original vintage photographs of 1960s America: people, politicians and scenes of the alternative culture, the review calling it incredibly thoughtful and considered, documentary photography dealt as arcana. The method matters; these are period originals, not styled recreations, so the deck is a primary-source archive wearing tarot's structure, the era's actual faces holding the offices its mythology assigned them anyway, fools, hierophants, towers and all. Photographic documentary tarot is the catalog's rarest method, the Nameless Tarot's travel collage its nearest kin, and applying it to a single radical decade makes the deck double as history: the counterculture reading its own cards. Haigwood's self-published editions circulate accordingly. It suits sixties historians and veterans, documentary-photography collectors, political-deck readers beside the Electronic Republican's satire, and anyone who suspects that era was America's Major Arcana moment. The photographs, being real, out-argue every illustrated nostalgia; that was always documentary's advantage.