The Fool's Progress

"Two important characteristics of maps should be noted. A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness." Alfred Korzybski The Fool’s Progress explores the contrasting ways by which words and images signify or create meaning. The titles are appropriated from the Major Arcana, the 22 picture cards of the Tarot deck. Carl Jung speculated that these curious texts might represent archetypes and, collectively, map out a spiritual journey from ignorance to enlightenment. The photographs were not made to illustrate their titles, but to test them, to see if they still have relevance, if indeed they ever did. As images, they talk to each other as much as to their assigned names, poking fun at each other’s meanings, making rabbit ears, cracking jokes. Images are rich in allusions and possibilities in a way that words can never be, forced as they are to hide their meanings with folded arms and prim typography. It is the words, though, that release the images from historic time and space and the burden of denotation, to see what else they might signify and thus become mythological. Now the Fool can make real progress, recognizing the archetypes for what they really are, and realizing at the completion of his journey that the true mystery of the World is the visible, not the invisible.