Bea Nettles’ 1975 Tarot deck, Mountain Dream Tarot was recently acquired for the Rare Book Collection and is currently on display in the Grosvenor Room. B&ECPL holds other important works by Nettles, most notably Breaking the Rules: A Photo Media Cookbook. Breaking the Rules has provided incredible insight into Nettles’ process when creating the Mountain Dream Tarot nearly 20 years earlier.
In the early 1970s, artist Bea Nettles created the first ever photographic Tarot deck in the style of the iconic 1909 Coleman-Smith/Arthur E. Waite deck. Though Nettles’ created the concept while she attended the Penland School in North Carolina, the deck itself was produced in Rochester, New York, after Nettles moved there to teach at R.I.T. Only 800 of this first edition were printed in 1975.
Though this is the first Tarot deck added to the Buffalo & Erie County Public Library’s Rare Book collection, tarot decks intersect with the existing Rare Book collection in very synergistic ways. The Rare Book Room (RBR) collection already includes many notable artists’ books, occult texts, and book arts objects; this addition fits right in. The Rare Book Collection at B&ECPL in good company in acquiring this deck—Mountain Dream Tarot is in the collection of 23 other cultural institutions in North America, including the Toronto Metropolitan University, the George Eastman Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Princeton University Library—to name a few.
The roots of Tarot go back to the game of Tarocchi in Italy in the 1420s, but it was only in 1909 that the modern Tarot deck we know today was created by two members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn: artist Pamela Coleman-Smith and mystical scholar Arthur E. Waite. While the first 22 cards, the Major Arcana, have established imagery and meanings, Coleman-Smith was the first to illustrate the pip cards, the four suits of Wands, Cups, Swords and Pentacles, with scenes and symbolic imagery. The illustrations Coleman-Smith created have become iconic as the Minor Arcana and are still the basis for many decks today–including Mountain Dream Tarot.
The Fool as depicted by Bea Nettles (left) and by Pamela Coleman-Smith (right) in the 1909 Rider-Waite-Smith deck.
To really appreciate Nettles’ work, one must understand that her photographic art works were created in a pre-digital, pre-“Photoshop” era—all of the image manipulations visible in her photographic work were created through physical techniques involving chemicals, light, and iterative production. The experimental photography techniques Nettles first explored in Mountain Dream Tarot were later explained in Breaking the Rules: A Photo Media Cookbook, another book by Nettles in the B&ECPL collection.
Breaking the Rules is exactly what it claims to be—a “cookbook”, but not for anything edible! This cookbook is a compilation of Nettles’ personal recipes for how she created the formulas that allowed her to edit her photographic images the way she wanted. These recipe formulas involve complicated and precise chemicals, dark rooms, and targeted light. Over thirty years later, digital image manipulation such as Photoshop has long been the norm, but because of Nettles’ “photo media cookbook,” photographers who still work with darkroom technology can learn her analog techniques.
In the two images pictured below, one can see how Nettles keeps coming back to the symbolic imagery of the Tarot in her explorations with photographic manipulation. Mountain Dream Tarot is pictured on the top; below is a later image created by Nettles’ as part of her project, Knights of Assisi: A Journey Through the Tarot. In Breaking the Rules, Nettles included the image on the right to describe the process of “Hand Coloring” photographs.
Breaking the Rules: A Photo Media Cookbook is non-circulating, but available for patrons at Central Library.
If you’d like to see more images of Mountain Dream Tarot, the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, NY, has digitized the whole deck. Though the 1975 deck in the rare Book Collection will not be available for Tarot readings, a commemorative edition was published by Nettles in 2019, and is available for purchase on her website here.
The Grosvenor Room: Genealogy, Local History, Maps, Music & Rare Books 