Russian Criminal Playing Cards

Russian Criminal Tattoo Police Files Volume I features more than 180 photographs of Russian criminal tattoos and official police papers from the collection of Arkady Bronnikov, regarded as Russia’s foremost authority on criminal tattoo iconography. From the mid-1960s to the late 1980s, Bronnikov worked as a senior expert in criminalistics at the USSR Ministry of […]

Over the past decade, tattoos have become one of the most popular forms of visual culture in the world. TTT: Tattoo is a survey of 250 of the best international tattooers working today. Included are established practitioners – Duncan X, Tomas Tomas, Scott Campbell, the Leu family, Stephanie Tamez – and lesser-known emerging talents, all […]

This book reveals the importance of playing cards in Russian criminal culture. The hand-made decks are beautiful works of art in their own right. Prohibited by the prison authorities, they are constructed from innocuous materials procured from the everyday routine of prison life. During construction both the cards and their designs are adroitly manipulated so […]