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Lot Essay
Russian photographer Sergei Vasiliev is celebrated for his images of tattooed Soviet prisoners, which document the secret coded language of criminals in the USSR. The artist was a staff photograph for the newspaper Vecherny Chelyabinsk for over thirty years, during which time he also worked as a prison warden. Taken between 1989 and 1993, and later reproduced as prints, his photographs accompanied a series of drawings by Danzig Baldaev, who catalogued the various tattoos that prisoners scraped and inked into their skin. Riddled with hidden messages about their crimes and the Soviet regime, these designs provided an illicit network of communication, strewn with insults about the violent and repressive authorities. Though the KGB originally decried Baldaev’s work, they eventually realised that documenting these tattoos could support their criminal files, and brought in Vasiliev to provide photographic evidence. The results, however, were far from clinical, offering instead a series of powerful humanising portraits: the present work was included in the Saatchi Gallery’s 2012 exhibition Gaiety is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union. Three printed volumes of the Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia, published by FUEL, are now held in the Design Museum, London.
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Not examined out of frame. It is our view that the work appears to be in very good condition.