The Japanese Tattoo

Zusatztext "American photographer Sandi Fellman used a rare large size Polaroid camera to create these photos of Irezumi Japanese men and women who wear elaborate full-body tattoos. Fellman treats the tattoos as artworks and their creators as artists. Her text touches on the tattooing process! common motifs! the sociology of the tattoo! and relationships between the tattoo masters and their clients. Author D.M. Thomas has contributed two pages of his reactions to these unusual and even disturbing images. The 46 color plates in this volume! most of them whole body nudes! should prove provocative! fascinating! or repellant to a wide variety of library patrons." ? Library Journal Informationen zum Autor Sandi Fellman is a well-known photographer whose work has been featured in many one-person and group exhibitions in the United States! Europe! Japan! and Australia. Her photographs can be found in numerous private and public collections! including the Museum of Modern Art! The Metropolitan Museum of Art! Bibliotheque Nationale! and Center for Creative Photography. Her work has also been widely published over the past fifteen years. Klappentext A crimson fish wrestles a man. A horned demon stares menacingly. These vivid scenes are tattoos, created in pain, incised in the flesh of the Yakuza, Japan's feared secret society of gangsters INTRODUCTION Irezumi is a defense, a shield. The tattoo say, If you approach too closely, beware! It is like the Medusa, with snakes in her hair, of Western mythology, and like Keats's snake-woman, the Lamia? Eyed like a peacock, freckled like a pard, Vermilion-spotted, and all crimson-barr'd? The irezumi's skin, which has borne the fiery pain of the needles, becomes cool, reptilian. The images of dragons, jagged lightning flashes, fish scales, and the rippling of the moving body that a photograph cannot capture, increase the effect of a defensive barrier. Do the irezumi defend themselves against their emotions? Against the technology, consumerism, and conformism of modern Japan? The commuter in his business suit, who is secretly wearing feminine underclothes, may be an irezumi. Secrecy. Separateness. The mirror. Recognition of an artist's work can assume macabre, practical overtones in the case of the Japanese tattoo masters: it can help to identify a murder victim. Every irezumi?a living painting! Imagine it in the United States. A mangled corpse is dredged up from the Hudson River. ?Send for the master. He is taken into the morgue, inspects the poor victim, and says, ?Undoubtedly a Chagall. Cops and medics crowd around eagerly as the expert points out the unique qualities of the master. The word spreads: ?We brought up a Chagall this morning. Then the Metropolitan Museum becomes interested, bids for it, adds it to the Picasso-prostitute knifed in her room the previous month? Idea for a Japanese short story. A master looks at the corpse of a young man, once his homosexual lover, and says, ?This is a Horiyoshi. He is divided between admiration and jealousy. He does not look at the young man's face. East meets West in this book. Sandi Fellman's clear and intelligent art makes use of the most advanced photographic technology. Her subjects are people who have chosen to suffer years of torture, and perhaps even shortened their lives, in order to make their bodies look unnatural. East meets West, yet the two do not hold together. They seem to struggle against each other, and shy away. What was happening in the mind of the artist, as she took the photographs, and in the minds of the irezumi who allowed her to do so? Such questions do not occur to me in the case of the more conventional photography; they occur to me here because of the sheer alienness of the subjects. I can no more get inside their painted skin than I can get inside the carp...

Auteur

Sandi Fellman is a well-known photographer whose work has been featured in many one-person and group exhibitions in the United States, Europe, Japan, and Australia. Her photographs can be found in numerous private and public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bibliotheque Nationale, and Center for Creative Photography. Her work has also been widely published over the past fifteen years.

Texte du rabat

A crimson fish wrestles a man. A horned demon stares menacingly.

Résumé
A crimson fish wrestles a man. A horned demon stares menacingly. These vivid scenes are tattoos, created in pain, incised in the flesh of the Yakuza, Japan's feared secret society of gangsters

Échantillon de lecture
INTRODUCTION

Irezumi is a defense, a shield. The tattoo say, If you approach too closely, beware! It is like the Medusa, with snakes in her hair, of Western mythology, and like Keats’s snake-woman, the Lamia…

Eyed like a peacock, freckled like a pard,
Vermilion-spotted, and all crimson-barr’d…

The irezumi’s skin, which has borne the fiery pain of the needles, becomes cool, reptilian. The images of dragons, jagged lightning flashes, fish scales, and the rippling of the moving body that a photograph cannot capture, increase the effect of a defensive barrier. Do the irezumi defend themselves against their emotions? Against the technology, consumerism, and conformism of modern Japan? The commuter in his business suit, who is secretly wearing feminine underclothes, may be an irezumi. Secrecy. Separateness. The mirror. Recognition of an artist’s work can assume macabre, practical overtones in the case of the Japanese tattoo masters: it can help to identify a murder victim.

Every irezumi—a living painting! Imagine it in the United States. A mangled corpse is dredged up from the Hudson River. “Send for the master.” He is taken into the morgue, inspects the poor victim, and says, “Undoubtedly a Chagall.” Cops and medics crowd around eagerly as the expert points out the unique qualities of the master. The word spreads: “We brought up a Chagall this morning.” Then the Metropolitan Museum becomes interested, bids for it, adds it to the Picasso-prostitute knifed in her room the previous month…

Idea for a Japanese short story. A master looks at the corpse of a young man, once his homosexual lover, and says, “This is a Horiyoshi.” He is divided between admiration and jealousy. He does not look at the young man’s face.

East meets West in this book. Sandi Fellman’s clear and intelligent art makes use of the most advanced photographic technology. Her subjects are people who have chosen to suffer years of torture, and perhaps even shortened their lives, in order to make their bodies look unnatural. East meets West, yet the two do not hold together. They seem to struggle against each other, and shy away. What was happening in the mind of the artist, as she took the photographs, and in the minds of the irezumi who allowed her to do so? Such questions do not occur to me in the case of the more conventional photography; they occur to me here because of the sheer alienness of the subjects. I can no more get inside their painted skin than I can get inside the carp that adorns many of them.

I find—I should add—the Japanese car worker, who writes a suicide note to his boss instead of his wife, equally unknowable.

Zen Buddhism teaches that enlightenment comes from within, not from an external agency. The tattoo becomes a manifestation of the man or woman’s inner life. What pictures would modern Europeans or Americans choose as manifestations of their inner reality? Most of us, I suspect, would find it difficult to choose a symbolism capable of expressing our deepest values. The more sensitive would fall back on subjective imagery, such as the depiction of a loved person, but the streets would also be filled with the faces and bodies of fashionable idols—fo…