Danzig Baldaev grew up in a Russian children's home, his father having been denounced as an enemy of the people. He was later ordered to take a job as a warden in Kresty, an infamous Leningrad prison, where he worked from 1948 to 1981. It was a job that allowed Baldaev to continue his father's work as an ethnographer – by documenting the tattoos of criminals.
The photographs, drawings and texts published now over 3 extensive volumes are part of a collection of thousands tattoos accumulated over a lifetime by Baldayev. The icons and tribal languages he documented are artful, distasteful, sexually explicit and sometimes just simply strange, reflecting as they do the lives and mores of convicts. Skulls, swastikas, harems of naked women, a smiling Al Capone, assorted demons, medieval knights in armor, daggers sheathed in blood, benign images of Christ, mosques and minarets, sweet-faced mothers and their babies, armies of tanks, and a horned Lenin–these are the signs with which this hidden world of people mark and identify themselves.
Here's a taste of an The Guardian’ s article inspired by the exhibit called "Russian Criminal Tattoo: Breaking the Code," which gives some background on Baldaev's life and work:
“In effect, the tattoos formed a service record of a criminal's transgressions. Skulls denoted a criminal authority. A cat represented a thief. On a woman, a tattoo of a penis was the kitemark of a prostitute. Crosses on knuckles denoted the number of times the wearer had been to prison, and a shoulder insignia marked solitary confinement, while a swastika represented not a fondness for fascism but a refusal to accept the rules of prison society. A criminal with no tattoos was devoid of status, but to have a tattoo when you hadn't earned it - bearing the skull sign of a criminal authority, for example - often resulted in the tattoo being forcibly removed with a scalpel by fellow prisoners. And "grins" (depicting communist leaders in obscene or comical positions) were a way for criminal to put two fingers up at the authorities.”
Heavy with symbolism and hidden meanings, the tattoos depicted a complex world of hierarchies, disgraces and achievements. Mostly anti-Soviet and frequently obscene, they are a portal into a violent world that ran alongside the worst excesses of the Communist era.
http://fuel-design.com/index.php?menu=5&tattoo=1
Photographs taken by Sergei Vasiliev in the early 1990s.
