Full-body tattoo coverage. Tongue bifurcation. Silicon facial implants. It's just one blogger's ranking, but you can't deny that the list of Top 10 Physically Modified People is a completely fascinating peek into first-world freedoms and the notion of body ownership.
Danzig Baldaev catalogs the otherworldly skin art he's seen in more than 50 years spent in hospitals, prisons and morgues (as a warden and criminal investigator) of the now-former Soviet Union, where political commentary and rebellion were expressed with a needle in elaborate, inky allegories, forming the language of an underground social order. His collected images spawned two mesmerizing volumes of the Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia; the first is out of print, but the second is still widely available.
Writer Carl Zimmer asked readers of his blog The Loom (many of whom work in the sciences) whether they bore any body art in homage to their field of inquiry. The response was overwhelming, and the resulting gallery of inked images -- DNA sequences, prehistoric skulls, the solar system -- would do Einstein (who we're pretty sure was tat-free) proud.
written on Monday Sep 10, 2007
body,
art,
catalogues.
