CRUEL ANECDOTES

Is tattooing a cool fashion statement or a sign of threatening sub-cultures?

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Sunday supplement magazines, such as The Observer, will occasionally carry articles with photographs of Amy Winehouse, David Beckham and other celebrities with visible tattoos (see illustrations below). A few hundred words will be written acknowledging the existence of this phenomena but not investigating too closely the reasons behind it. It is a sign of the growing tolerance for tattooing that no words of censure accompany these features but neither does the writer advocate the acquisition of a tattoo. It is simple documentation, a sitting on the fence, as if the media were waiting to see which way public opinion will sway before jumping on that particular bandwagon.

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Below left: Ajitto © Robert Mapplethorpe 1982

Below right: Ryan © Sita Mae Edwards 2004

Chris Wroblewski is possibly the foremost writer on tattooing and has published 19 books on the subject. One of his series of books is called Skin Shows, a direct allusion to the artefact, not the person (see illustration above right). He adheres to the style of cropping in close to his subjects and concentrating on the illustrations rather than the person. He carries a piece of black velvet and positions the relevant body part in front of it, thus isolating any hint of the person. His photographs have become more and more extreme over the years, moving on from straightforward tattooing to piercing and scarification. Recent pictures of an Asian festival showed young men slashing their faces open with knives so they could insert car exhaust pipes through their skin. This progression would suggest that Wroblewski has, for quite a long time, lost sight of the fact that he is photographing people and has shifted to cataloguing events that can only be described as self-mutilation.

Sontag (1977, p.41), quotes Diane Arbus as saying that the camera “is a kind of passport that removes moral boundaries and social inhibitions, freeing the photographer from any responsibility toward the people photographed”. This would certainly seem to be the case in Wroblewski’s more outrageous photographs.

Wroblewski’s books, in common with many others, carry an ‘anthropological’ section which documents the different civilisations throughout the world who have worn tattoos as ‘rites of passage’ or tribal identification. A common claim among authors writing on tattooing is that “archaeological evidence indicates that tattooing was probably practiced among peoples living during the late Stone Ages” (Sanders, 1989, p.09 [my emphases]).

The drawing of comparisons between these tribes and modern tattooing manifests itself in the current trend for ‘tribal’ decorations on the arms and legs. Similarly, because Japan has a long history of tattooing, some of the most prized Western body decorations are Japanese-based. These alliances to other, older cultures provide the longed-for link to respectability.

The American photographer, Sita Mae Edwards, goes some way towards balancing the representation of tattooed people rather than simply the tattoos themselves. Her images reference those of Robert Mapplethorpe in that she photographs torsos and young men whose tattooed arms are obscuring their face in some way. Mapplethorpe’s pictures were deemed pornographic in content by his contemporaries but his classical styling and inventive lighting lifted a tawdry subject into another dimension. Similarly, Edwards is helping to legitimise tattooing by introducing the idea of ‘art’ into her photographs.