The Deck of Cards
‘The Deck of Cards ’ by Ben Yates, United Kingdom, 2011.
The Deck of Cards was produced by Ben Yates, a Devon-based artist, in 2011. He describes the pack as “a playable deck where each card is represented by a photograph of objects, architectural details or people all involving the card suits” . The pack contains 52 cards and 4 jokers, and might perhaps be described as semi-transformational. The pips have often been placed to fit into the photograph or are represented by appropriately shaped objects.
Ben Yates describes his work as Photo-Cubism - digital prints mounted on a 3-dimensional structure of blocks of different heights. His mission has become taking photography and melding it with other art forms, innovating in a technical and aesthetic way. His work is bright and intricate, yet simple, vibrant and young - extracted from the artist’s website►
Above: ‘The Deck of Cards ’ by Ben Yates, United Kingdom, 2011.
By Peter Burnett
Member since July 27, 2022
I graduated in Russian and East European Studies from Birmingham University in 1969. It was as an undergraduate in Moscow in 1968 that I stumbled upon my first 3 packs of “unusual” playing cards which fired my curiosity and thence my life-long interest. I began researching and collecting cards in the early 1970s, since when I’ve acquired over 3,330 packs of non-standard cards, mainly from North America, UK and Western Europe, and of course from Russia and the former communist countries.
Following my retirement from the Bodleian Library in Dec. 2007 I took up a new role as Head of Library Development at the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP) to support library development in low-income countries. This work necessitated regular training visits to many sub-Saharan African countries and also further afield, to Vietnam, Nepal and Bangladesh – all of which provided rich opportunities to further expand my playing card collection.
Since 2019 I’ve been working part-time in the Bodleian Library where I’ve been cataloguing the bequest of the late Donald Welsh, founder of the English Playing Card Society.
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