- 480 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
In 1891 J. Murakami travelled from Japan, via San Francisco, to Vancouver Island and began working in and around Victoria. His occupation: creating permanent images on the skin of paying clients.
From this early example of tattooing as work, Jamie Jelinski takes us from coast to coast with detours to the United States, England, and Japan as he traces the evolution of commercial tattooing in Canada over more than one hundred years. Needle Work offers insight into how tattoo artists navigated regulation, the types of spaces they worked in, and the dynamic relationship between the images they tattooed on customers and other forms of visual culture and artistic enterprise. Merging biographical narratives with an examination of tattooing’s place within wider society, Jelinski reveals how these commercial image makers bridged conventional gaps between cultural production and practical, for-profit work, thereby establishing tattooing as a legitimate career.
Richly illustrated and drawing on archives, print media, and objects held in institutions and private collections across Canada and beyond, Needle Work provides a timely understanding of a vocation that is now familiar but whose intricate history has rarely been considered.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover Page
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: âNot the Type of Profession You Could Pursue in a Trade Schoolâ: Understanding Commercial Tattooing
- 1 âWhat Happened in the Tattoo Shop?â: Regulation and Resilience across Canada, 1881â1989
- 2 Who and Where Was âSailor Joeâ? Media, Amusement, and Investigation by the fbi and rcmp, 1887â1981
- 3 âSamples Can Be Seen on the Premisesâ: Changing Spaces in Victoria and Vancouver, 1891â1983
- 4 âTo Heighten the Effectâ: Relations between Visual Art and Tattooing in Halifax, 1894â1979
- 5 âAn Artistâs View of Tattooingâ: Aba Bayefsky in Toronto and Japan, 1970â1995
- Epilogue: âEverybody Is the Typeâ: Tattoo Conventions and a Century of Commercial Tattooing in Canada
- Figures
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index