Essex Book Festival, EA Festival and Firstsite are excited to present a talk with Dr Matt Lodder about his new book, Tattoos.

The true history of tattoo as both art and profession in the West

Thursday 28th November, 7pm
Firstsite, Colchester
Book tickets at eafestival.com

There is a pervasive stereotype of tattoo culture as relating to an underworld of scoundrels, sailors, and ne’erdo-wells, yet it has existed in the West as a professionalized art practice for centuries. Drawing on extensive new research and unprecedented access to largely unpublished private archives of photographs, art, and ephemera, Matt Lodder offers a new perspective on the history of commercial tattooing in Europe and the United States, beginning even before it emerged as a recognizable profession in the mid-nineteenth century. In the process, he shows that the art of tattoo has long been both practiced and commissioned by individuals across economic, gender, and class divides; he also examines the stylistic trends that have shaped tattoo’s development as an art form over its history.

Matt Lodder will introduce the many artists and professionals who shaped tattoo history, including early figures like Martin Hildebrandt, the first-known professional tattoo artist in the West; prominent woman artists like Grace Bell and Jessie Knight; mid-twentieth-century icons like Sailor Jerry and Les Skuse and the Bristol Tattoo Club; and contemporary industry stars including Ed Hardy, Davy Jones, and the Leu family.

Richly illustrated with rarely published images, this important book is the first to examine the history of tattoo in the west as both a serious profession and an art form.

“Importantly, I want to focus in this book almost exclusively on the artists themselves, and their influences, innovations, interconnections… the specific work of the artists has been too often neglected in the understanding of tattooing beyond the industry itself”

Matt Lodder, Introduction

Matt Lodder is a senior lecturer in art history and theory and director of American Studies at the University of Essex.