Looking at the world's tattoos

Chris Rainier has seen bare flesh etched
by the crudest of implements: old nails,
sharpened bamboo sticks, barracuda
teeth. The ink might be nothing more
than sugar cane juice mixed with campfire
soot. The important part is the meaning
behind the marks.
“Blank skin,” the photographer says, “is
merely a canvas for a story.”
Rainier has documented these stories in
dozens of cultures across the globe. In
New Guinea, a swirl of tattoos on a Tofi
woman’s face indicates her family lineage.
The dark scrawls on a Cambodian monk’s
chest reflect his religious beliefs. A Los
Angeles gang member’s sprawling tattoos
describe his street affiliation, and may
even reveal if he’s committed murder.
Whether the bearer is a Maori chief in
New Zealand or a Japanese mafia lord,
tattoos express an indelible identity.
“They say, ‘this is who I am, and what I
have done,’” Rainier says.
Rainier’s portraits are featured in a new
film, Tattoo Odyssey , in which he
photographs Mentawai people living in a
remote village on the Indonesian island of
Siberut. Their spider web-like tattoos,
which echo the shapes and shadows of
the forest, are meant to anchor the soul
in the body and to attract benevolent
spirits. The film premieres September
26th on the Smithsonian Channel.
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.”
Rainier was Ansel Adams’ last assistant—
they worked together in the early 1980s,
until Adams’ death in 1984. Like his
mentor, Rainier is primarily a black-and-
white photographer. Unlike Adams,
however, he is less captivated by
landscapes than by the topography of the
body, and he specialized in portraits. In
the 1990s, while traveling the world to
chronicle waning indigenous cultures, he
got interested in traditional tattooing—
which has cropped up from Greenland to
Thailand at one time or another—and its
sister art, scarification, a cutting practice
more common in West Africa and
elsewhere. Some of those customs,
Rainier says, are dying out as
modernization penetrates even remote
areas.
Yet he is also fascinated by the current
tattoo craze in the United States,
apparent everywhere from Nevada’s
Burning Man art festival to Pacific Coast
surf beaches to Midwestern shopping
malls. Once confined to a few
subcultures, tattooing has today gone
mainstream: according to a 2006 Pew
survey, 40 percent of Americans between
the ages of 26 and 40 have been
tattooed.