Tatau: Samoan Tattoo, New Zealand Art, Global Culture

Photographs by Mark Adams

Published by Te Papa Press, May 2023

308 pages, Hardback

ISBN: 978-1-99-115098-1

RRP (incl. GST): $75

Purchase from Te Papa store here

Tatau is a large, beautiful, cloth bound coffee table book that documents the history and importance of Samoan tattooing. It includes dozens of large full page photographs – taken over 45 years – by photographer Mark Adams. It is a seminal work. 

Mark’s photography is extraordinary. The way he works – with large format film, and the equipment he uses is relatively unusual. Mark’s subjects are not just the person being tattooed, they are the room, the house, the wallpaper, the carpet within the image. They are photographic stories of the person receiving the pe’a, as well as sociological studies.

Tatau is the definitive publication of an art project that is genuinely unique. It’s an important book that extensively discusses and references the work of the late Sulu’ape Paulo II, the pre-eminent figure of modern Samoan tattooing; his legacy and influence of tatau to past and future generations, in addition to the work of other tufuga ta tatau (tattoo artists).

Mark Adams is one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s foremost documentary photographers. His work has been extensively exhibited in Aotearoa, Australia, South Africa and Europe and at Brazil’s São Paulo biennale.

Sean Mallon is of Sāmoan (Iva and Mulivai, Safata) and Irish (Belfast) descent. He is Senior Curator Pacific Cultures at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, where he specialises in the social and cultural history of Pacific peoples in Aotearoa. He is the author, with Sébastien Galliot, of the award-winning Tatau: A History of Sāmoan Tattooing (2018).

Nicholas Thomas is Professor of Historical Anthropology and Director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. His most recent book is Voyagers: the settlement of the Pacific (2020). He co-curated the major 2018 exhibition Oceania at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and the Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, Paris, with Peter Brunt.

Peter Brunt is of Sāmoan and English descent, with ancestral connections to Lano, Vaiala and Bedfordshire. He is Associate Professor of Art History at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington, where he teaches and researches the visual arts of the Pacific, focusing on the role of art in mediating cross-cultural encounters. With Nicholas Thomas he co-curated the major 2018 exhibition Oceania at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and the Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, Paris.

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