In The Illustrated Man, the 1969 film of Ray Bradbury's story, Rod Steiger played a man whose fantastic tattoos acted as windows into another dimension. Similarly, Araminta de Clermont’s new photographic exhibition, Life After holds that tattoos are more than mere fashion statements, and that studying them can offer insights into both their wearers and their cultures. The intention is to blur the distinction between so-called fine art and its outlaw variant. Not a new idea – hell, even Spier Wine Estate recently jumped on the tattoos-as-art bandwagon with their flashy new TV advert – but de Clermont’s take is something new. For the show she’s documented a cultural phenomenon: the “chappies” (local prison slang for the tattoos) of the notorious South African Numbers Gangs, the 26s, 27s and 28s. The result of a year-long process, the project saw de Clermont tracking tattooed ex-jailbirds in Cape Town’s “hidden places” — homeless shelters, derelict tenements and township shebeens. “I photographed them wherever I found them, always in their own environments.”

Despite its dark, gritty subject matter, the show transcends the eroticization and perpetuation of otherness that often plagues documentary photographs of marginal subjects. In these portraits De Clermont, herself a recovering heroin addict, seems to be empathically involved with her subjects, who in certain pictures could be a surrogate for her earlier self. Up close shots of arms and torsos marked by smudged blue-black images, symbols and words etched into the skin with rudimentary instruments dominate the show. But these black-and-blue marks conjures up images of other, more agonistic bruises, namely, the needle marks bruises De Clermont must have once sustained. As De Clermont says, the project made her consider her own biography and “how it would be if we all had our past mistakes permanently emblazoned across our faces.”