Publisher: Silverlens
Photographer: Jake Verzosa
Book dimensions: 8.25 × 10 in
Year: 2014

A photobook of portraits documenting the last generation of women from indigenous communities in Kalinga, northern Philippines, whose bodies are extensively adorned with traditional batok tattoos.

The portraits are printed on a semi-coated stock, giving it a slight sheen without the distracting glare of gloss, closer to the feel of the authentic gallery prints. The black-and-white images are rendered in a subtle duotone for a deeper tonal range. The spacious layout allows the reader to appreciate the portraits one at a time, contextual details placed discreetly on the facing page. The accompanying essays and visual glossary are printed on a gray-toned matte stock to differentiate. The cover is simple, dominated by an iconic image of the famed mambabatok Whang-ud, making the book itself an object worthy of display.

The Last Tattooed Women of Kalinga presents a series of portraits by Jake Verzosa who laments and celebrates a dying tradition of tattooing in villages throughout the Cordillera mountains in the northern Philippines. For nearly a thousand years the Kalinga women have proudly worn these lace-like patterns or batok on their skin as symbols of beauty, wealth, stature and fortitude. Applied as part of a painful ritual, the vivid tattoos—abstractions of motifs such as ferns, rice bundles, centipedes and flowing rivers—reflect a rite of passage and a powerful bond with nature. Yet today this intricate form of self-adornment has largely been abandoned due to changing aesthetic perceptions.

Between 2009 and 2013, Verzosa traveled extensively to document the last generation of women with the batok. The resulting pictures reveal the artistic designs of the tattoos, as well as their symbolic functions as signs of social belonging and testimonies to personal struggle and triumph in which the skin becomes a “story.” Accompanying Verzosa’s portraits is a detailed illustrated glossary of the tattoo types and their meanings.

—Steidl, 2017

The open-case binding and the raw board edges give a rough texture to the book, echoing the rugged beauty of the tattoo tradition's mountain environment. The exposed black thread recalls the soot-based ink that is embedded into the skin, the dark lines displayed proudly like one would a traditional tattoo.

Buy the new Steidl edition at artbooks.ph (Philippines) or Steidl (rest of the world)
Official site: Jake Verzosa