Job Stoppers

Job Stoppers is a portrait series of people with facial tattoos. I've always been interested in tattoos and tattoo culture and with more and more people getting face tattoos in the current age I felt like I could create an interesting series of different types of people with remarkable face tattoos. It's interesting to see how it's a radical change to someones look. A change that's nearly impossible to hide and becomes a facial feature of its own. Everybody has 2 eyes, a nose and a mouth but these people choose to enhance their look by adding spectacular ink to their faces. I'm specifically interested in photographing people that have brutal face tattoos as this changes the look of these people more drastically than smaller more subtle tattoos do. Many of the people I photograph have a tattoo style called blackwork, which is a brutal, primitive and tribal-looking style of tattooing. Some of them also have other body modifications such as tongue splits, cropped ears, dermal implants or tattooed eyes. Tattoos are no longer considered taboo or shocking so it's interesting to see how the people I photograph try to find new extremes by getting large and prominent face tattoos. Facial tattoos are often described as "job stoppers" because in a lot of cases it can minimize the chance be hired. While posting these portraits on Instagram I always include in the caption what these people to in their daily lives and try to describe what motivates them. I started the series in the beginning of the year and have met about 25 people in the meantime.