Body art around the world

For two decades, Chris Rainier has traveled around the world photographing body art -- from tattoos to piercings to scarification -- in a variety of cultural contexts. He's visited LA gangs, hill tribes in New Guinea, the Mentawa of the Indonesian island of Siberut, and countless other locales to understand how and why they modify their flesh, and document the processes and results. The new film Tattoo Odyssey documents Rainier's visit to Indonesia, and the bulk of his work is included in the 2006 monograph Ancient Marks: The Sacred Origins of Tattoos and Body Marking. Above is a Boni tribesman with ritual scarification, from West Africa's Burkina Faso. Below, a woman in Morocco with Henna-stained hands. Smithsonian profiles the work of Rainier, who it turns out was Ansel Adams's last assistant. He first became interested in body art while photographing disappearing indigenous cultures. From Smithsonian:

Rainier’s images “lifted a veil on something that wasn’t accessible to us in Western culture,” says Deborah Klochko, director of San Diego’s Museum of Photographic Arts, which has displayed Rainier’s portraits. His work, much of it presented in the 2006 book Ancient Marks: The Sacred Origins of Tattoos and Body Marking, may be the most comprehensive collection of its kind, Klochko says. Yet, she points out, “he’s not an anthropologist. A scientist would take another kind of picture of the same markings. He brings a different sensibility, an emotional connection.”...

The modern West’s first recorded encounter with the Polynesian practice of tattowing dates from 1769, when Joseph Banks–a naturalist aboard the British ship Endeavour–watched a 12-year-old girl (the “patient,” he called her, though modern aficionados might prefer the term “collector”) being extensively adorned. Banks’ description is brief but harrowing: “It was done with a large instrument about 2 inches long containing about 30 teeth,” he wrote in his journal. “Every stroke...drew blood.” The girl wailed and writhed but two women held her down, occasionally beating her. The agony lasted more than an hour.

"Looking at the World's Tattoos" (Smithsonian)

Ancient Marks: The Sacred Origins of Tattoos and Body Marking (Amazon)

• [Marshall]

  Not to pile on, but the whole purpose of body modification has historically largely been to initiate into a different stage of life or to trumpet group identity. The same folks who decry body modification are often the same folks who have high heel-shaped bunions, breasts kept artificially perky by wearing a bra or have had any of a variety of minor plastic surgeries. They’re just griping that modified individuals are abandoning their group for another one.

• [SamSam]

  That photo of the henna’d hands is startlingly beautiful.

• [sapere_aude]

  To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,
  To throw a perfume on the violet,
  To smooth the ice, or add another hue
  Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light
  To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish,
  Is wasteful and ridiculous excess.

  – Shakespeare, King John (Act IV, Scene II)

  • [sapere_aude]

    However, in rebuttal, there’s always THIS ;-)

• [nutbastard]

  In an age when 95% of my peers have piercings and tattoos, the most rebellious thing I can do is not have any.

  Besides, tattoos and piercings are just sanitized, custom scars for people too wussy to let the world mark them chaotically. Then, having been tattooed, said wuss has an excuse to decline risky activities – don’t want to scratch the tats, you know.

  Also, those grapes are probably sour anyways.

  :P

  • [mausium]

    “Also, those grapes are probably sour anyways.”

    The honesty is appreciated :D

  • [Anonymous]

    Why does it have to be about rebellion? You know the only thing dumber than doing something because everybody else is doing it is to not doing something because everyone is doing it. Try being yourself, its fun.

• [David Pescovitz]

  I liked what Mister Jalopy said when someone asked him if he has any tattoos or piercings:

  “Nah, I have a stock chassis.”

• [Anonymous]

  I agree with #4. Who cares if everyone else is doing it? We all modify ourselves to a certain degree anyway, so I don’t see why there has to be an “us vs them” mentality about it. No one is better than someone else just because they do or don’t have tattoos, piercings, whatever.

• [Godfree]

  Aren’t body mods rites of initiation for most cultures? Becoming a man, woman, married, etc. Therefore, not so much about rebellion as about acceptance into a group. I think the only act of rebellion tattoos represent anymore is against Puritan-Americans.