Product Description
This unrivaled collection of striking photographs traces more than ten thousand years of cultural history--from the body painting of stone age peoples to the self-inflicted piercing of punks and the enduring image of the carnival clown in modern industrial society--illustrating an art form that is finding new relevance in the world of today. To set the photographs in context, a distinguished team of art historians, ethnologists, and archaeologists has provided enlightening commentaries that document the development of an extraordinarily broad spectrum of body painting, tattooing, and scarring techniques. Here are the extravagant displays of the richness of skin decoration in New Guinea and Africa, the ceremonial body painting of Australian Aborigines, the spectacular tattooing of Japan and Polynesia, the religious symbolism that embodies the skin of Indian pilgrims, and the painted masks both of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and of the Peking Opera--combining to provide an astonishingly wide panorama of body decoration throughout the ages.
About the Author
Karl Groning owns a vast archive of pictures, assembled from around the world, and has previously written several illustrated volumes on a broad variety of subjects. He is also an acclaimed book designer, and was Art Director of Axel Springer Verlag for more than 23 years.
