Category: Unit 2

Bibliography of references :

• Berger, J. (1972) Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin Books.

John Berger’s Ways of Seeing begins with a simple but radical idea: the way we see things is always shaped by what we already know, believe, and have experienced. We never look at an object in isolation, we look at it in relation to ourselves, our memories, and the context in which it appears. This idea is central to my project, which explores why certain ordinary objects feel charged with meaning, almost magical. Because seeing is always personal and contextual, my line of inquiry asks: Does graphic design give meaning to things or is it the other way around?

Berger’s book is unusual in that its design does the arguing. Rather than simply describing his ideas in text, he uses the layout of the book itself to demonstrate them. Images appear without captions, or with captions that say something unexpected. Paintings are placed beside advertisements, beside other paintings, beside photographs, and the meaning of each image changes depending on what surrounds it. The reader doesn’t just read about this effect, they experience it directly on every page. Curation and layout are not neutral decisions. Placing one image beside another is an act of meaning-making. Context is as significant as the things themselves.

This directly influenced my early experiments in the project. Inspired by Berger’s Essay 2, which abandons text entirely and communicates entirely through compositions of images, I began curating still life paintings around single recurring objects. I gathered paintings containing pitchers, or skulls, or lemons, and placed them side by side to study how the same object changes meaning depending on its context: what surrounds it, what period it comes from, what other objects it is arranged with. This process of comparative curation became a method for understanding the symbolic language of still life, learning, for example, that the pitcher became to show temperance across centuries of painting, or that the lemon almost always carries an idea of deception or bitterness beneath a beautiful surface.

Berger also traces the origins of the visual arts back to magic and ritual. He argues that art was originally an experience set apart from everyday life, made in a specific place, for a specific sacred or magical purpose, and that this sense of the image as something powerful and charged has never entirely disappeared, even in its most commercial forms. This is directly relevant to my project’s central interest in how object become talisman: the object that has been elevated from the ordinary into the symbolic through sustained attention and ritual use. My tarot deck attempts to do this, by taking mundane objects and restore to them the kind of attention and significance that Berger describes as the original function of the image.

Berger’s argument also connects naturally to Koren’s Arranging Things, which I use as my main studio reference. Where Berger explains that meaning is always produced by the relation between an image and its context, Koren provides the precise vocabulary for how that relation is constructed, through the spatial decisions of hierarchy, alignment, and proximity. Together they form the theoretical foundation of my tarot deck, where the meaning of a reading is never in a single card but always in the relationship between the three cards drawn, and in how the reader chooses to place them.

• Koren, L. (2014) Arranging Things: A Rhetoric of Object Placement. Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press.

Koren’s Arranging Things is built around the idea that the placement of objects is never accidental or neutral. Every decision about where something sits, how close it is to another object, its size or colour are all meaningful. Koren calls this a rhetoric of arrangement applying it to a set of visuals painted by Nathalie du Pasquier. The chosen objects and the way they are arranged determine what a composition communicates. This idea sits at the heart of my project, which explores how ordinary objects accumulate symbolic meaning and how graphic design can make that meaning visible.

The book is structured in two parts. The first is a short theoretical introduction outlining eight principles for reading and constructing arrangements: hierarchy, alignment, sensoriality, metaphor, mystification, narrative, coherence, and resonance. The second is a long sequence of annotated still life photographs, each one analysed through those principles. What is interesting about this structure is that the book itself demonstrates its own argument, it is an arranged object.

The eight principles can be understood in three groups. The first three, hierarchy, alignment, and sensoriality, describe the immediate physical experience of looking at an arrangement from placement to colour, size or temperature. It is a basic first analysis of what people see without trying to understand. The next three, metaphor, mystification, and narrative, analyses what happens when the objects are placed into a context, next to each other and with a past. The element that resists easy interpretation is what Koren calls mystification, and he argues that this resistance is not a failure but a deepening of meaning. Narrative is the story that emerges from this arrangement. The final two principles, coherence and resonance describe the experience of the reading as a whole. This framework transformed my practice. Before reading this reference, I was working intuitively cutting objects out of still life paintings, isolating them, curating them in groups. Koren gave me a language investigate my inquiry.

Koren’s eight principles became the structural logic of my tarot deck. Each card presents a single object without any background. But when cards are drawn together, Koren’s system translated to game rules help read the image created. The reader must consider which card dominates, how to place them in relation to each other. They must notice what each object feels like before they read its name. They must read the cards as an image composed by their unconscious. The reading instructions I have written for the deck map directly onto Koren’s eight principles, turning a theoretical framework into a lived ritual.

Koren also raises a question that is important for my project: who decides what an arrangement means? He describes his rhetoric as provisional and not a definitive system. This matters because it acknowledges that meaning is not fixed by the designer but produced in the encounter between the arrangement and the person reading it. A tarot reading works exactly this way. I designed the system: the objects, the names, the rules, but the meaning of any particular reading belongs entirely to the person drawing the cards. Koren’s framework legitimises this openness.

• Bouchez, H. (2017). A Wild Thing. Ghent: Art Paper Editions.

Bouchez describes the intention of her book as an endless quest for beauty and joy in the mundane.Tracing the history of design from craft traditions to contemporary consumerism, she argues that objects have increasingly become vehicles for manufactured desire, their emotional and symbolic meanings artificially created through marketing rather than accumulated through use and attention. What is most interesting for my practice is her claim that objects are not passive, that they carry traces of relationships, time, and attention, and that this accumulated charge gives them something close to a presence or an inner light.This supports my approach to the objects in my tarot deck: I am not proposing a meaning while trying to reveal a charge that is already there, embedded in the object’s history, its symbolic tradition, and the personal memories it activates in the reader. Bouchez legitimises an intuitive and sensitive way of working. In my practice, I did different experiments to try understand and extract this essence of objects.

• Sontag, S. (1977). On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Sontag’s central argument that to photograph something is to appropriate it, to establish a relationship with it, is directly relevant to my interest in how images transform ordinary objects. My project began with photography precisely because of this quality: the camera isolates an object from its surroundings, frames it, and in doing so changes its context and status. What was overlooked becomes significant and what was ordinary becomes meaningful. Sontag also describes photographs as memento mori, every image of a thing is also a record of its transience, its mortality. This connects my photographic experiments directly to the vanitas tradition in still life painting, where objects are arranged not to celebrate life but to remind the viewer of its brevity. Most important to my project is her observation that photographs function as talismans. This is exactly what my tarot cards attempt: to use the image of an ordinary object as a means of accessing a meaning that exceeds the object. My card game becomes an object itself and the card echoes talismans.

• ‘What Do Pictures Want?’. In: What Do Pictures Want: The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 28–56. (reading list) 

Mitchell’s essay is more provocative. She states that images are not passive objects waiting to be interpreted but active presences that make demands on the viewer. He treats pictures as if they possess a kind of life, but as a way of shifting attention from what images represent to what they do, how they behave, and how they affect the people who encounter them. This reframing is directly relevant to my project, which is concerned with the moment an ordinary object stops being just a thing and starts feeling charged, animated, almost magical. Mitchell’s argument extends and complicates Bouchez’s idea that objects carry an inner life. Where Bouchez focuses on the physical object, Mitchell applies the same logic to images of objects, suggesting that the photograph or drawing of a thing can be as active and demanding as the thing itself. Regarding my tarot cards, the image on each card is not simply a representation of an object but a presence, capable of producing feeling and meaning independently. This encourages me to think carefully about the object itself and how its image behaves when placed in a reader’s hands.

• Steyerl, H. (2012). ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’. In: The Wretched of the Screen. Berlin: Sternberg Press, pp. 31–45. (reading list)

Steyerl’s concept of the poor image introduces a critical perspective on how images circulate within contemporary capitalist systems. Rather than valuing high-resolution, polished images associated with advertising and consumer culture, she focuses on degraded, compressed, widely shared images that operate outside traditional hierarchies of value. This is important for my practice because it challenges the aesthetic norms that often neutralise or standardise objects through clean, desirable imagery. In relation to my interest in the magic of ordinary objects, this suggests that magic might emerge not through perfection but through distortion, loss, or circulation. This connects to the history of still life painting itself. Still life was long considered the lowest genre in the academic hierarchy of painting. Yet it is precisely from this lowly, overlooked genre that the richest symbolic language of objects emerged. Steyerl’s in defense of the poor image is, in this sense, a contemporary version of the same argument, that symbolic power does not depend on prestige or polish, and that the overlooked image often carries more presence than the celebrated one.

• Yanagi, S. (2018 [1972]). The Beauty of Everyday Things. London: Penguin Classics.

Yanagi’s collection of essays argues that the most meaningful objects are not the rare or the precious but the plain and ordinary, the everyday things made by hand, used daily, and rarely noticed. He writes about the Japanese mingei craft tradition, as he mourns a shift in industrial society where mass production has severed the relationship between the maker, the object, and the person who uses it. Workers no longer find meaning in what they make, and as a result objects lose the vitality they once carried. Yanagi’s question “they may simply be things, but who can say they don’t have a heart?” is a question I also asked myself and tried to respond to with my tarot deck. Each card takes a single ordinary object, and restores to it the kind of attention Yanagi describes. By naming the object and isolating it, the card makes the reader to look again at those mundane objects

• Sontag, S. (2009 [1965]). ‘On Style’. In: Against Interpretation and Other Essays. London: Penguin, pp. 15–36. (Reading list)

Sontag’s essay argues against the separation of form and content in art. She insists style is not a decorative layer applied over meaning but is meaning. The way something is made, the decisions about colour, shape, material, and composition, are inseparable from what it communicates. This is directly relevant to my tarot deck, where every formal decision carries symbolic weight. The choice to render an object in watercolour rather than photograph it, to use a single word rather than a sentence, to leave the background empty rather than fill it, none of these are aesthetic preferences, they are the concept. Her observation that a work of art is an experience rather than a statement also shapes how I think about the reading ritual. The tarot cards do not deliver a fixed meaning to a passive reader, they create the conditions for an experience that requires, as Sontag puts it, the complicity of the experiencing subject. The reader is not receiving the meaning, they are producing it.

• Tillmans, W. (2002). If One Thing Matters, Everything Matters.

Tillmans’ book operates on the simple principle that nothing is more worthy of attention than anything else. In the exhibition, portraits, architecture, abstract light experiments, domestic objects are all printed at varying scales and pinned directly to the wall without frames, without hierarchy. In the book, all the photographs are brought back at one same size, like a catalogue but without giving more information about the context. Tillmans demonstrates that this levelling of attention is a deliberate act of seeing. His layout choices reinforce this argument formally. He also shows that arrangement is never neutral. This connects directly to Koren’s rhetoric of arrangement and to my own interest in how graphic design can give meaning to overlooked objects.

• Quintanar, J. Dutch Landscape 13 (2022). Exhibited at TERRANOVA, Barcelona, 1–31 October.

Quintanar’s practice explores drawing as a system of rules and protocols. He transforms his artworks into games to be played with rudimentary marks, simplified forms, striking colour, and an almost childlike naiveness. He reduces recognisable objects to near-abstract outlines and numerical notations. For my project, this is both a formal and conceptual reference. It demonstrates that abstraction does not diminish an object’s symbolic charge but can intensify it by removing everything that distracts from its essential form. His approach encouraged me to explore how far I could simplify the objects in my tarot deck while retaining their legibility and symbolic weight. There is also something important in his framing of drawing as play, as a process governed by rules but also instinct. This connects to my interest in the tarot deck as a system, a set of objects organised by a logic that produces meaning through placement.

• Matisse, H. (1953) L’Escargot (The Snail) [cut-paper collage]. Tate Modern, London.

Matisse developed his ‘gouaches découpées’, late in his life because he was unable to paint due to illness.It is a technique of cutting painted paper into forms and arranging them into compositions. In works like L’Escargot, he reduced a recognisable object to colour and geometric shapes, eliminating all descriptive detail until only the essential form remained. The cut itself became the drawing, form and colour mixing together. This is directly relevant to my tarot deck, where each object must be immediately legible and visually striking, but simple enough to be read differently by different people. Matisse demonstrates that stripping an image of detail doesn’t diminish its symbolic charge but concentrates it. Matisse arranges his cut forms into compositions that produce different narratives depending on placement and proximity, which is the logic of my tarot reading system, where cards arranged together tell a different story every time.

• Rousteau, P. (2021). Enfances. Paris: Polka Galerie.

Paul Rousteau’s photographic practice transforms ordinary objects and everyday scenes into something ethereal and almost immaterial. Through blur, overexposure, intense colour, and deliberate loss of legibility, he dissolves objects into atmosphere rather than describing them. This is directly relevant to my interest in the magic of ordinary objects, because Rousteau demonstrates that the symbolic charge of a thing does not depend on its clarity. What is particularly significant for my project is how Enfances places abstracted images and pictures of the mundane on exactly the same level. Nothing is elevated above anything else. This democratisation of attention connects to Tillmans’ approach, and reinforces my own decision to treat ordinary objects as worthy of the same visual seriousness as any symbolic or sacred image. His work reminds me that photography can produce aura rather than simply record it, and that imperfection, blur, and loss of detail can intensify an object’s presence rather than diminish it.

• Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. London: Routledge.

Ingold’s central argument is that making is not the imposition of a pre-conceived idea onto passive material, but a conversation between the maker and the material, a process of following, attending, and responding rather than controlling. He refuses the disciplinary boundaries that separate anthropology from art, archaeology from architecture, arguing that all making is fundamentally the same activity: a form of sustained attention to the world and to the things within it. This is relevant to my project, as it legitimises an intuitive, process-driven way of working. My tarot deck is not designed from a fixed concept but emerges through experimentation with objects, images, and materials. Ingold also frames the made object as a cultural and ritual object. There is no separation between the anthropological study of a talisman and the act of making one. My tarot deck is a designed and printed object, but it is also a ritual tool, a system of symbolic meaning rooted in centuries of cultural practice around objects.

• Jonquet-Caunes, J. (ongoing). Objets Trouvés. Illustration series.

Julie Jonquet-Caunes is a Paris-based illustrator and graphic designer whose practice is built around the ordinary object. In her series Objets Trouvés, she draws everyday objects, pieces of furniture, domestic items, mundane things, in coloured pencil, her style between hyperrealism and trompe-l’œil. The result is a collection of what she calls intimate portraits of the everyday. This is directly relevant to my project because Jonquet-Caunes demonstrates that the act of drawing an ordinary object shifts the attention we give it. This is exactly what my tarot deck attempts: to frame ordinary objects in a way that makes the reader see them differently. Her careful compositions also connect to Koren’s rhetoric of arrangement, the placement, balance, and proximity of objects within each image are as meaningful as the objects themselves. For my own mixed media approach, her work proves that illustration can carry the same symbolic weight as photography.