The blacks here are two kinds of black, and I cannot stop dividing them: the flat black of the tattooist’s t-shirt, and the living black worked into the skin of his forearms, a dense reef of ink that reads almost blue in memory, though the print gives only grey. Between these two men the whole tonal range plays out — the pale slick of oiled hair, the warm mid-grey of a bare young chest, the small violent white of a gauze pad pressed to the arm. It is a photograph made of surfaces, and every surface is a skin.
I am held, though, by one thing: the little wad of cotton, blotched, held against the fresh wound of the tattoo, just below an emblem and the broken letters that read something like PIC. That soft dressing is the tenderest object in a scene of needles and machinery, and it tells me the whole truth the composed faces withhold — that this beauty is being paid for now, in a small ongoing pain, under a dark lamp.
Behind them a framed dragon coils across a print in the manner of the ukiyo-e, the floating world that gives the parlor its name — pleasure and impermanence, the old subject. Weber, who taught American fashion to love the sailor and the athlete, found in this Honolulu back room a truer version of his theme: masculinity as something inscribed, chosen, endured. The gelatin silver print keeps it all in one grey breath, the tattooist’s concentration and the boy’s downcast patience. I keep returning to the cotton, and to what it soaks up.
The blacks here are two kinds of black, and I cannot stop dividing them: the flat black of the tattooist’s t-shirt, and the living black worked into the skin of his forearms, a dense reef of ink that reads almost blue in memory, though the print gives only grey. Between these two men the whole tonal range plays out — the pale slick of oiled hair, the warm mid-grey of a bare young chest, the small violent white of a gauze pad pressed to the arm. It is a photograph made of surfaces, and every surface is a skin.
I am held, though, by one thing: the little wad of cotton, blotched, held against the fresh wound of the tattoo, just below an emblem and the broken letters that read something like PIC. That soft dressing is the tenderest object in a scene of needles and machinery, and it tells me the whole truth the composed faces withhold — that this beauty is being paid for now, in a small ongoing pain, under a dark lamp.
Behind them a framed dragon coils across a print in the manner of the ukiyo-e, the floating world that gives the parlor its name — pleasure and impermanence, the old subject. Weber, who taught American fashion to love the sailor and the athlete, found in this Honolulu back room a truer version of his theme: masculinity as something inscribed, chosen, endured. The gelatin silver print keeps it all in one grey breath, the tattooist’s concentration and the boy’s downcast patience. I keep returning to the cotton, and to what it soaks up.