The sacred origins of tatttoos and body marking.
One had said that when we lose our tattoos, we lose our culture. Wade Davis has the concerned on the origins of tattoos and 'exotic' cultures as well as the mopdern, rebelious views and subcultures of today's society when working with Chris Rainier on this project.
Tattoos they all began with pigments extracted from the ground, the designs sketched upon skin expressed not onlu the values of particular culture, but also fidelity to them and thus, stood as expressions of solidity. The motifs used became definitions of culture, symbols of inclusion and iconic representations that carried not only discrete meanings, but multiple meanings, deep connotations that could only be understood and recognised by those born to the particular cultural reality the forms celebrated.
After centuries the patterns and ideas of tattoo textued skin transformed into European minds and lands. The British were both attracted and repulsed they saw in the faces of the dead the very designs that they advesaries carved into wood war clubs, canoes, and long houses, The body was just another surface upon which mythological beings might be brought into the world. Here for the English, themselves a tough Island people, was a new definition of commitment.The Birtish ambiualence towards this sacred art had found its perfect match. Its very powr lay in its deviance, and in time the truly criminal adopted the stigma of grace and inclusion.
Today, the art of bodily decoration had emerged less as a protest than a keen desire to reestablish a connection to those primordial impulses that have driven human societies throughout history
The celebration of the primitive is not a cheap impulse but reflects a hunger to find meaning and association in the modern world where the individual has been cast adrift from community, and where science - as Saul Bellow wrote: has made a housecleaning of belief.
To contemplate and summarise the images in the book; whether the living faces of Polynesia, the raised flesh of Africa, or erotic tensions of reinvention celebrated at America's own Burning Manis to remember why all people through whatever the impediments, to mark their bodies, seek and to celebrate a transformation of the human spirit.
Widely exhibited, Chris Rainier is one of the World's leading documentary photographers. He has journeyed to every continent, including an expedition to the North Pole and seven to Antarctica. As a photographer for "Time" and many other outlets, he has covered conflicts in Bosnia, Somalia, Ethiopia, Cambodia and Iraq.
Chris is a contributing photographer for National Geographic Adventure and contributing correspondent for NPR's, "Day to Day". Rainier continues to focus on documenting endangered tribal cultures, and also serves as the co-director of the National Geographic Society's Ethnosphere Cultures Program.
Tatooed hands: LA, California.
"Bar code", Santa Fe, New Mexico
Labeled with ironic innvendo, this artist's body markings include a date of birth bar code a ubiqutous faceless numbered sequence crucial to contemprorary commerce.
Turf is paramout to street gangs, and tattoos clearly link the individual to a single group and place, identyfing the gang, the members, status within it and sometimes whether he or she has killed in street warfare.
"Tattooed lovers", Nevada
Coopting the concept of the biblical flood, these men have used burned-out computers and televisions to construct their very own and personal "Noah's Ark" in which to be saved.
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