As part of this month's Photo Oxford festival, The Old Fire Station is hosting another fantastic exhibition of portrait photography. Contrasting Kazem Hakimi's use of colour but echoing his head-on framing and white backgrounds, Russian Criminal Tattoos: A Lexicon of Crime is a very different beast. It not only exposes to us detailed and meaningful body art proudly work by Russian inmates, but unpacks the complex meanings behind the secret language that these tattoos constitute.
Graphic design publishers FUEL are behind the Russian Criminal Tattoo project, and as such are alive to the pictographic properties and intricate lines of the art here collected - see their encyclopaediae of the same name. They're indebted to criminalistics expert Arkady Bronnikov who collected many shots; photojournalist Sergei Vasiliev; and prison guard Danzig Baldaev who recreated reams of these tattoos with his skilful penmanship. Discover the angels, crosses, snakes and stars that symbolise status, social comment and willingness to reoffend, and find out how criminologists attempted to crack the codes written on the bodies of their subjects.
