SKIN DEEP INTRO by Nika Cavat – for Senior Seminar – “Horror”

http://stevenburtonphotography.com/new-page

And so the body wounded is a very mortal flesh remembered in a particularly unique way. What is this phenomenal
body, this poetic body of markings? What is the wound in its relation to language, to identity, and to being named?
Does being wounded, marked, scarred, tattooed, violated in some bodily way change our relation to the way we
express ourselves incarnationally through body gesture or in language?
The Wounded Body: Remembering the Markings of Flesh,
Dennis Patrick Slattery

 The sexual trafficker tattoos his moniker or nickname on the body of the girl he turns out each
day onto the streets of Los Angeles. It is his definitive way of saying to the world, she’s mine –
and she’s available for a price.

 The Maori people, indigenous to New Zealand, tattoo their faces with the use of a piercing
comb, to symbolize social rank, status, power and prestige.

 Judaism forbids tattooing the flesh as it’s a reminder of the numerical tattooing the Nazis forced
on Jewish concentration camp prisoners.

“Skin Deep” is a photography project by Steve Burton, featuring gang members at Homeboy Industries,
a Los Angeles-based nonprofit that offers gang members a new life. After taking black and white portrait
style photos of them, Burton, using Photoshop, then meticulously removed their tattoos. The result was
an astonishing series of images that both document the harsh realities of gang life, and then in a magical
kind of rewinding, imagines that life in reverse. Such a juxtaposition allows the subjects -- and us as
consumers of the photos -- to envision themselves before the outward manifestations of their dark past
were carved into their flesh. The images themselves don’t necessarily have to be scary – but many are,
featuring skulls with yawning mouths, demons with bloody daggers, women zombies with rotting flesh,
or insane clowns with melting eyes. The fear they elicit in the viewer is also a way of capturing and
taming the fear the gang member has experienced by marking his body. He ingests the outward fear,
taming it.

Many people the world over use tattooing – or prohibitions thereof - in their cultures for very diverse
reasons. For our purposes in studying all the permutations of the horror genre, we’ll be focusing now on
gang members and their tattoos. Historically, gang affiliation has required certain rites of passage and
initiations in order to belong. And this is not just any “club” – the street gang is an instant family for the
boy or girl without a family. The gang may provide a home, food, clothes, spending money, drugs,
alcohol, sexual favors, but the allegiance is iron-clad. While joining a gang may seem like an elective
thing, in reality, for most kids it’s a requirement for survival. Typically, one is born into a gang, and it’s
not uncommon for siblings, cousins, parents and even grandparents to have been in the same gang. The
acquiring of a tattoo that identifies you as a member of a particular gang is one of the most effective and
immediate forms of identification. The tattoo (often received in prison) then becomes a non-verbal
emblem of membership. You don’t need long-winded explanations; in fact, sometimes it’s all a gang
member will need to dissuade outsiders from escalating a tense situation.

However, what happens when a gang member no longer wishes to remain in the gang? The same tats
that once cemented him into a violent, but familial brotherhood now present him with a serious
problem. They are visible manifestations of a darker, violent past – one steeped in fear, abuse, and
criminality. He must divorce himself from this past, as manifested by the tats, in order to re-enter the
world of the “normal” and to have some hope of their blessings. Those who have obeyed societal rules
and laws, and thus have earned the right to an education, housing, employment, and acceptance, as the
belief goes, don’t permanently ink their bodies. The “normal” become the gate keepers to a kinder,
more gentle life, a life that those shaped by the mean streets and the prison walls rarely have the
opportunity to enjoy.

In Symbolic Interaction, a review by Michael A. Katovich of Clinton R. Sanders’ book, Customizing the
Body: The Art & Culture of Tattooing, he writes: “the tattoo serves to symbolically redefine one’s past
and to inform one’s future. It represents a boundary between the body that was and the body that will
be”.

Their removal further allows the gang member to reimaging himself as a baby – before parental abuse,
before addiction, before neighborhood violence, before racism and police brutality. The baby has a
clean slate --- with all the hope and possibility imaginable. Upon seeing himself scrubbed clean of his
many facial, neck and full body tattoos, Homeboy Marcos Luna comments: “Damn, I look like my son,
eh? Are you fucking serious, dude? That’s how I look. How many years is that? It’s a long time. It’s in my
20s (since he’s seen himself without tattoos). There are no words for it…Brings a lot of death, sadness,
hate and destruction…sick…just out of control, eh?”

Dennis Zamoran says, “I don’t know where I went wrong. I’m like the only rotten apple. My dad was
always in jail. I was on the run when I was 16 for attempted murder, and I was like, I have to leave.
David Pina comments: “It’s like I’m two different people. I’m like my dad…without all that stuff on my
body and my face. In this one, I look younger, but in this one, I look older.”

When horrible things happen to us, it either consumes us or we fight back. The gang member’s tattoos,
like other forms of body scarification, are a conscious, purposeful way of beating down horror, of
cauterizing it until the psychic hemorrhaging stops.

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Read:

Bodily Marks
https://www.encyclopedia.com/environment/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/bodily-
marks

“Scars” – Richard Jones