 webmaster of UK.People.Bodyart, co-founder of the newsgroup uk.people.bodyart, and maintainer of the group's IRC channel, #bodyart-uk, on efnet. |
Spirit and Flesh
I would like to nominate Fakir Musafar's Spirit and Flesh. Not particularly informative (it's a photo book), but some of the photos are lovely, and it's great to see the things he was doing all that time ago, well before BME and IAM popularized them.
 Piercer and manager of The Edge Tattoo in Rhode Island, in the process of organizing a Boston based suspension group. |
XBM
The late XBM was in my opinion a very good magazine. Most of the ones out now are for the most part tattoo oriented, not that I have a problem with this, but having a magazine that addressed the piercing industry as well and kept up on new advances, procedures and so on was interesting. Not to mention the magazine touched upon stuff most tattoo magazines don't. Scarification, branding, surgical body modification and so on. The columns were always interesting and I found it to be a generally well written mag. Rest in peace XBM.
 former staff member of BME's QOD. |
1000 Tattoos
1000 Tattoos is by Henk Schiffmacher. Okay, so this book came out in 2001... but I just found it in the bookstore this summer! It's an amazing collection of tattoo pictures, many dating back a century or so. It's not complete, and sometimes the details are sketchy, but it's my favorite tattoo-themed coffee table book. Hundreds of pages of amazing art.
 the mind behind BME. |
SKIN
Hands down this goes to Shelley Jackson's SKIN!!! For those who don't know, SKIN is a book tattooed onto thousands of people around the world, with each person known as a "word". It's not published anywhere else, and as the words die, the story changes. It's a brilliant piece of conceptual literary art.
 mod enthusiast, involved with the Om Summer Solstice Festival. |
ModCon Japanese edition
Because of its uniqueness, and the fact that it moves BME one step further into a global project, the ModCon Japanese edition. I think that it's a worthy winner for this award, because it looks at modification in a very different light than most of the regular tattoo/piercing mags that I've seen. It provides insight into the lives of people that would be considered exceptionally dysfunctional by many and portrays them as what they are: humans, with the same thoughts and feelings as we all have.
