Making of THE LOST TAROT

How is it all done…

The majority of the primary elements for The Lost Tarot were photographed over the course of several years at two Renaissance fairs: the Texas Renaissance Faire, the world’s largest and most ambitious, located near Houston, and the Sherwood Forest Faire, near Austin. A handful of images were staged and photographed at my home studio and surrounding areas. Some costumes, accessories, and armor for these images were created and shipped from distant lands.

My image world consists of people and landscapes unfamiliar to most, perceivably strange and ethereal, where place and subject merge fact and fiction; hinterlands where the veil has been lifted, far-flung outposts, port cities of the imagination, haunted territories, transition points between worlds, whirlpools spilling into parallel dimensions, shrouded lands straddling the waypoints between desire and dreams.

The whole world, everything we consider sane and normal, might well be a leather ball filled with air. In some places, the leather has been scuffed away to nothing. Ideally, my images transport the viewer to those landscapes of magical realism where the dividing line is thinner, masked, mystical, chimerical cities and citizens of the mind, at great distance, but near enough to touch.

The people in these images do not speak English, French, Chinese, or any known language. That they somewhat resemble us is mere coincidence. Their maker has traveled beyond the edge and returned with pictures. To the center of the earth, to the moon, backward in time, and into the future, the greatest journeys have always been those launched by the imagination.
I offer these image as visible proof of my own odyssey – there and back again.

Hansjurgen Bauer