Once upon a time, before the advent of the indie rocker and the alternative chick, before primitivism became a style trend and tattoo parlors set up shop on the good avenues, tattoos were the secret language of a restricted world, a world of criminals. The photographs, drawings and texts published here are part of a collection of 3,600 tattoos accumulated over a lifetime by prison attendant Danzig Baldayev. Tattoos were his entrance into a secret world, a world in which he acted as an ethnographer, recording the rituals of ...
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Once upon a time, before the advent of the indie rocker and the alternative chick, before primitivism became a style trend and tattoo parlors set up shop on the good avenues, tattoos were the secret language of a restricted world, a world of criminals. The photographs, drawings and texts published here are part of a collection of 3,600 tattoos accumulated over a lifetime by prison attendant Danzig Baldayev. Tattoos were his entrance into a secret world, a world in which he acted as an ethnographer, recording the rituals of a closed society. The icons and tribal languages he documented are artful, distasteful, sexually explicit and sometimes just simply strange, reflecting as they do the lives and mores of convicts. Skulls, swastikas, harems of naked women, a smiling Al Capone, assorted demons, medieval knights in armor, daggers sheathed in blood, benign images of Christ, mosques and minarets, sweet-faced mothers and their babies, armies of tanks, and a horned Lenin--these are the signs with which this hidden world of people mark and identify themselves.
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Seller's Description:
Very Good. 2003. Hardcover. Cloth, dj. Octavo. 400 pp. Profusely illustrated. Mild shelf wear to dust jacket. Altogether a copy in Very Good condition. Very Good. (Subject: Russia).
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Seller's Description:
Danzig Baldaev Drawings; Sergei Vasiliev Photographs. Near Fine in Very Good (in mylar) jacket. Hardcover. 12mo-over 6¾" 7¾" Tall. Textblock very clean and tight; Binding spotless and unworn; Sunned dust jacket, in mylar, edge and corner worn; The black and white photos and drawings are graphic and explicit; 391p.
