Author(s): Danzig Baldaev

Cards

This beautifully produced boxed set of 53 postcards contains stunning images from the best-selling Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia series of books. These hugely popular and influential books document the Russian criminal tattoo, revealing their hidden meanings. The motifs depicted represent the uncensored lives of the criminal classes; their tattoos were a secret tribal language, a method of showing status within the prison system. By turn they are extraordinary, artful, explicit or just strange, reflecting the lives and traditions of this previously hidden world. The box features 25 original sheet drawings by Danzig Baldaev and 25 photographs by Sergei Vasiliev. Each has a detailed description of the meaning of each tattoo on the reverse. Also included is a postcard of each of the three book covers. The drawings printed on the postcards are facsimiles of Baldaev's original sheets, reproduced directly from the Russian Criminal Tattoo Archive.

The set of 53 boxed postcards Tattoo Encyclopaedia are an ethnographic portrait of a closed society with its own symbolic language and rituals. The 25 drawings and 25 photographs here have been chosen from the thousands copied from convicts’ skins by prison attendant Danzig Baldaev and photographer Sergei Vasiliev, and give an insight into the aesthetic, political, sexual, ‘tribal’ and spiritual concerns and traditions of Russian criminal culture. If you want to post these postcards, you’ll want a second set to keep for yourself (or a set of the encyclopaedia itself). - Thomas