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!
