This is one of my favorite images of 19th century tattooing. It comes from an article titled “A Stroll through South Street,” that ran in Harper’s in 1889. The image, “A Professor of Tattooing at Work,” is one of the more instructive views of the period, particularly when it comes to the display of images in the parlor. As you may note, several pieces of flash are on the wall, but the bulk is contained in a book sitting on a table just to the left of the professor.

I often use this image as an entry point, and will do so in two weeks when I speak at the Artistry and Industry conference at Exeter University. For a lark, here is the abstract to my paper:

Ship to Shop: The Professionalization of Tattooing in New York

During the last third of the nineteenth century tattooing progressed from an amateur practice to a fully professional artistic venture. Stable tattoo parlors opened and the visual vocabulary was further solidified and standardized. In New York City, tattooists settled in the Bowery laying the seeds for a vibrant and competitive community of artists and businesses. The period from 1870-1900 witnessed not only an expansion of tattooing across class lines, with elites and sailors both going under the needle, but also serious technological innovation, transferring the art from hand needles to electrical driven tools.

This paper investigates the artistic practice of tattoists and tattooing as a commodity in fin de siecle New York through a range of source material. Prints and periodical sources illustrate the shop practices of the earliest known tattoo professionals. The connection between them and common perceptions about the art, formed through literary account and the carnival over the course of the nineteenth century, establishes the cultural milieu these artists worked in. The men and women who purchased tattoos, where they went and what images they chose to adorn their bodies, defined the boundaries of the acceptable consumption of tattoos, a vogue that reached people of all classes. My paper links tattooing to other industrial and decorative art commodities in order to establish the relationship between mainstream visual and material culture and this seemingly “fringe” activity. Finally, the way tattooists spoke about each other to the press relays central distinctions in the trade between the artists and the “jabbers” (those who engaged in hack-work). This distinction is crucial to my analysis of late 19th Century tattooing, as a practice that offers a clear window onto the inner working of a complicated artisan-based trade. I will reveal the professional nuances of skilled tattoists who used shop practices, press coverage, and client and professional networks to argue for artistic legitimacy.

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I’ve been going through my collection of antique tattoo flash, some 500 images,  and will post a few favorites during the course of the next week.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 4th, 2008 at 18:19 and is filed under Common stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.