Matt Lodder

"Suits Made to Fit"?

And the photo-book / project which came after it, Full Coverage. That's an incredible book; a really ambitious, beautiful, inspiring work.

Hello,

I’m Jason. I’m the apprentice at Lab monkey in Stirling, Scotland.

Fancy seeing you here! Hope it's going well, mate!

@Matt Lodder, something that comes to my attention especially from the posts in this thread and i think is worth mentioning is...i like your writing but if you shall intend on putting together something for the masses (the actual herds of sheep with interest) you are quite verbose and academic in presentation. remember to take into consideration that the general public, especially in tattooing, are responsive to the visceral/crass/urgency that most tattooing carries in it's history. so even if i can appreciate and enjoy your writing style, don't forget that feeling when a tattoo is finished and you look at it in the mirror and think "fuck yeah!". all of the excellent conversation and philosophical contemplations during the tattoo session are always great but in turn its that feeling of seeing it and the simple honest emotion that is tangible for the masses.

It's tangible for everyone, I think. Fuck yeah! :) As I said, tattoo fan first, academic second. The raw beauty of tattooing and its potential is what ultimately drives all of this!

I do have a tendency to be a bit high-falutin' at times, yet academics occasionally find my work too journalistic and populist (!). It's a fine line, and you're right about which side I need to walk.

@Matt Lodder, This isn't the place for a detailed one-on-one discussion or critique so I'll try to keep it brief. I'm sure the opportunity will arise for us to chat in the future.

As I said, I do enjoy most of your writing and I'm super happy that you can find a vocation writing about the things you enjoy and are passionate about.

Also, If you (or any writer) were to apease my concerns or work to my tastes, you simply wouldn't have a large enough audience to make any money, not would it hold any interest to academia. But I do think tattooing needs an academic text as much as featherweight boxing does.

I know you didn't set out to be a spokesperson, it's just that you are one of the few vocal tattoo enthusiasts that can write with any coherence or weight. That makes you one of tattooing's few online spokespeople who isn't an idiot.

I didn't mean that you were a total outsider but that the source of your research is not from the real world.

If there's one thing (other than hard work) that always commands my respect, it's first-hand experience or authenticity. For me, that's where your work is lacking.

An academically sound project with an accurate and expansive bibliography sounds great, unless its mostly based on oral history. Much of tattooing's history may not be strictly oral, but it is just as personal and was passed on in a one-to-one or one-to-small-group fashion.

If you plan to tackle a hefty tome that covers 'modern' tattooing's history (Captain Cook onwards), you better make sure that's it's better, more detailed, more accurate, comprehensive and interesting than anything Hanky Panky (Henk Schiffmacher for the google crowd), Sam Steward, Takahiro Kitamura, Ed Hardy, Mike McCabe or Chris Wroblewski have ever done combined, otherwise you are just another writer taking a paycheck from tattoo fans with an ephemeral publication. Unless your intention is to edit together existing difficult to find books into an accessible volume. That's an editors job and a copyright nightmare.

Regarding historical books on the 'artistic' side of tattooing (I prefer 'visual' or 'craft' as 'artistic' brings up a whole other unwanted argument):

There have recently been a few excellent books on localised (in time and geography) pockets of tattoo history, with great historical photos and flash. There are another one or two still to come in the next six months or so. Maybe the writing wasn't heavy on the academic side, but they were written for ease of communication not peer review.

Regarding the source of modern tattooing's classic designs. It's widely known but maybe not often written that they stem from popular or military culture of the age. to examine their source is to examine the culture they were expressions of. A lifetime's work, to make anything more than a fluff piece or passing mention, I'm sure.

There are already a book or two with illustrations by Cook's natural history illustrator, of islanders tattoos.

Despite my general suspicion of exposing tattooing to 'outsiders' I'd love to see a well researched, accessible, interesting and knowledgeable book on tattooing's history, written with mostly first-hand or new information but I don't think academic books are much use to fringe or subcultures. Tattooing used to be exotic but now it's commonplace so at least you have a larger audience. I doubt I'm your audience anyway.

I have a book on Japanese tattooing, written by an academic researcher. A few years ago it was a gold-mine of information, now, with cheaper world-travel for first-hand research and the ability of 'insiders' to publish their knowledge and sell it on Amazon.com, that book is now just a curiosity with cool old photos.

Academics and journalists used to bring the exotic to us normals, now the exotic can bring themselves to us, or better yet, we can visit them, or at least watch them on tv or the internet.

But I do wish you the best of luck. I'm sure my criticisms would have a small impact on your work anyway. I'm notoriously grumpy and negative regarding tattoo-related stuff. I am from The North after all. But I am pleased that your work is well-received and your passion and interests have become your career.

Much of the information anybody needs regarding 20th century tattooing is readily available, it's just not published. Hours of interviews with key individuals and hours of foraging through dusty boxes in garages, attics and basements around the world will unearth the information to make a truly great book on tattooing's history.

The effort needed to gain access to that information is another story.

Good Luck.

It's great to hear these critiques and opinions articulated, Stewart. They're exactly the things that are uppermost in my mind, and always have been. The things you highlight as areas for concern are all things I'm already aware of as potential pitfalls, and areas where sensitivity, care and respect are required.

I'm certainly not trying to write a book that's 'better' than those written by the great names you mention. I wouldn't be so presumptuous. I think my book (and, if I can sustain a career, 'books') will be different from theirs though, and usefully different. I'm acutely aware of the large number of people who do seek to piggy-back on and profit from, the work of tattooers and the tattooing in general, and I hope more than anything else that I'm not perceived in that way.

What I am trying to do is (amongst other things) take the writings of people like Hardy, and Steward, and Burchett, and Webb and a thousand others and weave them together, with wider reading and research, into something like a contextualised chronology. There will be some editing together of material from other sources - that is essentially what academic research often boils down to - and you're right that there is some value in that. And you're definitely right that recent localised books like Takahiro's book on Bob Roberts, or the Solid State books on Amund Dietzel, are absolutely excellent - and without tattooers keeping, treasuring and chronicling these stories I couldn't do my job, because (as you know), museums and archives and libraries have never taken much notice of tattooing's ephemera. But there does seem to me need for (or if need is too strong, potential use for and interest in) a fairly straightforward history book. It will, like all books, be only provisional, will definitely tell only a few of the infinite number of stories there are to be told. But I think it's a project worth doing, and I think I find myself in a position of being able to do it well.

I think and hope my skill-set, experience, and passions give me something of a unique opportunity - I know about, understand, love and respect the work and craft and influence of tattooing from the perspective of someone who has been immersing himself in tattooing since he was 14 years old, but also have the skills and the access and (in many ways) the privilege of a historian and scholar. I hope that combination will lead to an end result that's serious and interesting, but also accessible and honest and, as you say, authentic. Unlike pretty much every other academic who's written about tattooing (with the exceptions of Clinton Sanders and Sam Steward), I do understand that there are garages and lofts full of things worth knowing, and I do, through having been getting tattooed and talking to and building relationships with tattooers and by building what I hope is some small degree of credibility over the past 15 or 16 years, have access to at least some of those caches of fascinating stuff and untold stories. I've been lucky that people like Lal Hardy and Alex Binnie and even Ed Hardy himself have already been helpful even though the project is barely out of the planning stages, and that's really encouraging. There are many more people I need to talk to, and a million things I still have left to learn - but that's part of the joy of this, for me. I hope, for example, you'll let me rummage in your loft, so to speak!

As I said in the first post, I'm not a tattooer, so there will always be some critical distance between my writing and the world about which I write, of course. That is in many respects the curse of academia. Nevertheless, I'm always a tattoo collector and a writer and academic second, and the writing is drawn out of my self-driven interest to uncover, make sense of, and contextualise the art I - we - love. I do also think there's some small value in that slightly dispassionate distance in many ways - Steward's 'Bad Boys', unique in that it was written by someone who was an academic and a tattooer at the same time, is flawed in some respects by his absolute proximity to the subjects he was writing about (and there's a euphemism in there somewhere!). I can never be truly 'inside' tattooing in the way you are, and I understand that. But I've read a few of your posts here and I found myself agreeing with your really eloquently and passionately expressed sentiments about what tattoos, and being tattooed mean (in an emotional rather than descriptive sense). In some ways, too, my book is looking at the self-identity of tattooists and tattooing and their relationship to that awful, loaded word "art", so even reading and understand where you're coming from is fascinating to me. You craft with images and I craft with words, but I hope you can see and respect that there's at least some small cross-over there, and that I strive to take my craft as seriously as you take yours. Ultimately, I love tattoos, tattooing, its history, its culture and its universe and I'm trying to pay respect to it in the ways I am able.

Anyway, to save me rambling on, I think we're on the same page, more or less, about what the positives and potential negatives are for what I'm doing. The things that concern you concern me, too. They keep me up at night, and they drive me on to be better and work harder. I really appreciate the cautionary perspective, and utterly, utterly understand and appreciate where you're coming from.

When the time comes, I'd love for to you read the manuscript, or parts of it. If I can please, or appease, a grumpy Northerner, I think I'll be on to something!

I've known Matt for a good few years now and as much as I like him, I think it's a shame that he's becoming the 'spokesperson' for tattooed people. Part of me is pleased for him that he's found a way to make a living as a mostly respected academic/writer, even with visible tattoos.

But I don't want a spokesperson, especially one who solely views the world from the halls of academe or maybe the fetish club.

While I enjoy and agree with most of his writing, I can't help feeling I read it all somewhere before... maybe 15-20 years ago in TattooTime or International Tattoo Art when Shaw was editing. Ed Hardy already proved to the art world that tattooing wasn't just for sailors and whores.

In an age of high-rating reality shows about tattooing with celebrity tattooers I don't think we need to justify tattooing to the 'mainstream' anymore. No matter how well written or researched it may be.

Some of us want to take tattooing back underground, some of us want to take the high-profile ball and run with it. Whatever people do, it's gotta be more interesting than regurgitating the same tired articles. What's next? "Women can be tattooers too?" Yawn.

As a side note, Mario Desa said (via twitter) recently "Those who call tattooing 'fine art' know nothing abut either."

Thanks for the kind words, Stu.

I definitely agree that the "not just for sailors" thing is old news - in fact, that's basically what my recent articles have been about, really. I hope you don't think I'm just completely retreading old ground - in fact, I've been trying to talk about just how trodden that ground is, and trying to examine why these myths persist. I'm less repeating the assertion than examining the perception of tattooing in the media, and how these strange misconceptions have been repeated again and again since the 1890s, at least. I've been trying to analyse these old tropes, and trace them back to try and uncover where they start, because I'm as bored by them as you are. As you say, for more eloquent and informed people than I, Ed Hardy probably chief amongst them, have been pointing out that tattooing has crossed the social strata since the day Joseph Banks got tattooed fresh off the Endeavour, so what interests and frustrates me is that that (as you rightly say) banal fact is so tenacious.

I definitely don't want to be a spokesman for anything, and I really hope I don't come across that way. It would horrify me if that's the impression I give. I certainly wouldn't pretend or presume to be representative of anything except my own ideas. As you say, tattooing needs neither spokespeople nor justification, and I don't want my work to come across as doing either. If it does, I can only apologise, and promise to bear that in mind in future.

I'm simply interested in and passionate about tattooing, its history and its culture, and I'm just trying to put together knowledge from a variety of sources and put it together in a way that's accessible, interesting and novel. I'm lucky to have found myself in a position where my abilities as a researcher and writer have been able to align themselves with my passion and my love for tattooing, and all I want to do is find out as much as I can about it and share that in a sensitive, respectful way (which so often doesn't happen!).

As for coming solely from within academia, I hope that part of the strength of my writing is that I am passionate about tattooing and come, in some respects, from inside the tattoo community (whatever that might mean, of course). You've known me for a long time, so you know I'm a tattoo collector and fan before I'm an academic and historian. In fact, I became an academic because the information I went looking for about the art-form I love just wasn't there, really, and much of what I did find was so obviously wrong. Most, if not all, academic work on tattooing has been written by outsiders treating tattooing and tattooed people as just another research project, and that's why (it seems to me) that much of academic work on tattooing is so awful. I hope I can redress that balance, in my own small way.

My current project is, I hope, going to be more novel. I'm currently working on a fairly straightforward book-length history of tattooing, but one which looks at the artistic practice of tattooing rather than treating it as an anthropological freakshow. There's not been anything written like that since the 1930s, so I hope you appreciate it and think it's worth doing. I'm focussing at the moment on the period immediately after Cook's voyages returned to Europe in the 1790s - the iconic images of Western traditional tattooing were embedded by even the early decades of the 19th century, and yet (to the best of my knowledge) no-one has ever examined where they came from, and how they relate to the visual culture contexts from which they emerged. Pieces of research like that are something I hope I can bring to the table. It seems to be that there's a lot more to be learned, and a lot more to be said, about tattooing's history.

That said, I really appreciate your comments and concerns, Stu. I understand that as I'm not a tattooer, I'm always going to be on the periphery, to some extent, and I definitely understand the suspicion of and scepticism towards academics! I do want to write work and do research and conduct myself in a way that earns respect from people like yourself - serious, artistically-minded, talented, hard-working, knowledgeable and well-respected tattooers - and produce knowledge that is as of interest to those already well-versed in tattoo culture and history as those who might never have even thought about tattooing before. It's really important to me not to tread on any toes or rock any apple-carts!

As the work on my book goes forward, I'd love to sit down and talk with you and anyone else about its direction. I know you'll have a lot of really interesting things to say which can only make the finished product better.

On a final note: Mario Desa's definitely right!

Anyway, looking forward to seeing you soon.