Herbert Hoffmann, Navy-men on a fleet visit in Hamburg, 1966. Photo: © Courtesy Herbert Hoffmann and Galerie Gebr. Lehmann Dresden/Berlin
View of the exhibition space. Image AFP via Le Matin
The musée du Quai Branly, my favourite Paris museum, has recently opened a fascinating show called Tattooists, tattooed. I haven’t stopped telling people they should go and see it if they happen to be in town in the coming months. In town and french speaking preferably because a large part of the information in the gallery spaces hasn’t been translated in english.
I was expecting the usual about tattoos: the criminals, the freak shows, the MÄori warriors, the virtuosity of contemporary tattoo artists. I certainly found all of that in the show. I wasn’t however expecting to be shocked by the way tattoos were used to mark women.
Armenian Woman With Identification Scarring on Chest, 1919. Credit: © Underwood & Underwood/Corbis
In the 1920s, thousands of Armenian girls and women managed to escape the Genocide of their people by feeling to Syria. They were kept in slavery and forced into prostitution. In order to identify them and prevent their escape, their pimps tattooed their face and arms.
The girl in the photo above had just been rescued from a Turkish house and was cared for by the Y.W.C.A. workers at Aleppo.
Charles H. Carpenter, Ainu Woman, 1904
The significance of the tattoos worn by Ainu women couldn’t be more different. In the Ainu culture of Northern Japan, only women tattooed and were tattooed. The traditional practice was a prerequisite to marriage and to the afterlife. Mouth tattoos were started at a young age with a small spot on the upper lip. The design would gradually increase in size over the years.
The exhibition looks at tattoo through ages and cultures. It also demonstrates that tattooing is an art in constant evolution that traverses all continents, even if its essence, acceptance and purpose differ from one culture to another. While in societies from the Oriental, African and Oceanian worlds, tattooing had a social, religious and mystical role, the West saw it as a mark of shame. In the past, only criminals, prostitutes, sailors, circus freaks and other marginals would wear one. Or many.
The exhibition displays 300 historical and contemporary artefacts, including photographs, prints, paintings, posters, short films, tribal masks, books, clothing, tattoo-making instruments (such as Thomas Edison’s perforating pen) and even mummified samples of body parts and preserved tattooed human skin.
Isabel Muñoz, Maras portrait, 2006 © Maras series, 2006
I was obviously drawn to the displays showing how tattoo was used by ‘the underworld’ to frighten, claim their belonging to a certain gang, parade their crimes or share secret codes.
Tattoos were of great interest to European criminologists during the late 19th century. Many scholars believed that the presence of tattooing in European culture represented worrying signs of atavism, criminal proclivity, or dangerous ‘degeneration’ within their populations (via.) French criminologist Alexandre Lacassagne, however, believed that the choice of tattoo offered an insight into the criminal mind. He catalogued thousands of images according to type and body location. In 1881 he published Tatouages: Étude Anthropologique Et Médico-légale
Alexandre Lacassagne, catalogue of tattoos, 1920/1940
Alexandre Lacassagne, catalogue of tattoos, 1920/1940. Photo: The Skyline
Lacassagne’s archives offer an interesting parallel to the drawings and photos detailing Russian criminal tattoos.
Sergei Vasiliev worked both as a photographer for a newspaper in Chelyabinsk and as a prison warden when he encountered the work of Danzig Baldaev, the son of an ethnographer who was arrested as an “enemy of the people”. Baldaev spent over 30 years working in the Soviet penal system. He recorded the horrors of the Gulag in dozens of drawings but he gained fame for his meticulous documentation of the tattoos etched on the skin of the inmates.
Sergei Vasiliev, Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia Print No.12, 2010
Danzig Baldaev, Russian Criminal Tattoo
Nowadays, you don’t have to be a criminal to wear tattoos. But the notorious Mara Salvatrucha gangs of Los Angeles and Central America wear their symbols and languages on their faces.
With the help of a priest working on the rehabilitation of gang members, Isabel Muñoz gained access to a prison in El Salvador where she made stunning portraits of the men.
Isabel Muñoz, Maras portrait, 2006 © Maras series, 2006
Tattoo machine made in prison using a pen and electric wire
More images from the show:
Captain Costentenus tattooed by order of Yakoob-Beg, 19th century © Fonds Dutailly, Ville de Chaumont.
Britain’s first female tattoo artist, Jessie Knight, at work in 1955. ©Getty Images
British Pathé Woman Tattooist shows tattoo artist Jessie Knight at work in 1952
Other British Pathé about tattoos: a 1936 video showing how permanent makeup is tattooed on ladies’ faces, and Bristol Tattoo Club (1954.)
Circus Performer Djita Salomé, early XXth century
Hans Neleman, Dio Hutana, 1997
Herbert Hoffmann, Karl Oergel, 1956
Denise Colomb, Tattoo, 1950
Marc Garanger, Portrait of an Algerian woman, Algeria, 1960
Marc Garanger’s 1960 portrait of a woman whose village was destroyed during Algeria’s war of independence from France. She clearly wasn’t impressed by the French photographer.
Martin Hladik, Traditional Japanese tattoo © Photo: Tatttooinjapan.com / Martin Hladik
You probably don’t want to see this video but here is the Lizardman, i discovered its existence in one of the videos screened at the museum:
View of the exhibition space. Image AFP via Le Matin
View of the exhibition space. Image AFP via Le Matin
View of the exhibition space. Image AFP via Le Matin
Tattooists, tattooed is at the musée du Quai Branly until 18 october 2015. It was curated by Anne & Julien, founders of the magazine “Hey! Modern Art and Pop Culture,” in collaboration with tattoo artist Tin-Tin, anthropologist Sébastien Galliot and journalist Pascal Bagot.
Related: Russian Criminal Tattoo portraits.