Silver Era Tarot — Deck & Book
Seventy-eight cards built from black-and-white photography, each one carrying a single accent of color. The color placement is the whole visual argument of the deck: one red thread, one gold moon, one green stem in an otherwise silver-grey frame, and your eye goes exactly where the card wants it.
What you get
- 78 cards: 22 Major Arcana, 56 Minor Arcana across Wands, Cups, Swords, and Pentacles
- Card size approximately 2.875 x 4.5 inches
- 96-page companion book by Russell J. Moon
- Rigid hinged box with magnetic closure, 5.25 x 3.25 inches
- Artwork by Aunia Kahn, text by Russell J. Moon
- Published by Schiffer, 2010
- ISBN 978-0-7643-3438-2
- Ships at 0.87 lb
About the images
This is photography rather than illustration, staged and styled to evoke early black-and-white cinema. Every card was shot with the same two people in front of the lens: Aunia Kahn, who appears as the central figure across most of the deck, and Russell J. Moon. No other models appear anywhere in the seventy-eight.
That constraint does real work at the table. Instead of a cast of unrelated characters, you're watching one person move through every station of the tarot — the same face in the Fool, the Tower, and the World. Readers who work with the Major Arcana as a single continuous journey will find that the deck makes the argument for them without saying anything. Readers who prefer distinct archetypal figures per card may find it narrows the field.
Provenance and tradition
Structurally this is Rider-Waite-Smith and doesn't pretend otherwise. Full scenic minor arcana, the standard four suits, courts running Page, Knight, Queen, King. Strength sits at eight and Justice at eleven, which is Waite's 1909 reordering rather than the older Marseille sequence — worth knowing if you read with a Marseille-trained eye, since the two cards are swapped from where you expect them.
The 96-page book gives every card a short description of the image, an upright meaning, a reversed meaning, and keywords, plus two spreads to work from: past-present-future and the Celtic Cross. It's a working reference rather than a philosophical text, which suits the deck.
Aunia Kahn was born in Detroit in 1977 and has worked as a visual artist, gallerist, and curator; her other card projects include contributions to the 78 Tarot series and the Lowbrow Tarot. Michigan-made talent, if that matters to you — it does to us.
Who this is for
Readers who want RWS meanings under non-RWS imagery. Anyone drawn to gothic, vintage, or cinematic aesthetics. Beginners, because the included book covers uprights, reversals, and two spreads, so the deck is genuinely self-contained. Collectors of photographic decks, which remain a small category. And anyone who wants a full deck-and-book set without spending forty dollars.
