Russian Criminal Tattoo

Bodies as Text Sergei Vasiliev

Between 1948 to 2005, 3,000 drawings were compiled by prison warden and ethnographer Danzing Baldaev of the tattoos of the inmates. Supported by the KGB, who recognised the usefulness of such a document, these drawings were supplemented by photographs by Sergei Vasiliev, a fellow warden.
In 2003, the publisher Fuel began repackaging the sketches and photographs into the Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia.
Vasiliev’s black-and-white photographs are an important document of Baldaev's illustrations, designed to confirm their authenticity, but becoming something much more- humanizing the hardship and heartbreak behind the bravado of the illustrated flesh.