Coney Island Ink: Portraits of the Coney Island Tattoo Festival - Hardcover
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In the late 1980s, in the midst of New York City's infamous tattoo ban, Sideshows by the Seashore on the legendary Coney Island Boardwalk began hosting an event distinct from its usual fare of sword-swallowers, snake charmers, and other marvels: the annual Coney Island Tattoo Festival.
With New York's tattoo artists driven underground and the art form publicly condemned as part of a dangerous fringe culture, this gathering in "the People's Playground" served as a safe haven, drawing in tattoo enthusiasts from across the city and beyond. It also drew in a photographer from the Bronx who was fascinated by this world and the people who inhabited it. While not tattooed himself, for seven years Thomas Santelli served as the Festival's designated "official photographer," documenting this colorful event and the remarkable people who attended it with care and veneration.
Thomas Santelli (b. 1952) is a portrait and fine art photographer. He has also worked as a layout/mechanical artist, an illustrator, a graphic designer, an art director, a musician, and a college professor (Professor Emeritus of Art--retired). Santelli attended the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan, New York; earned his BFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York; and received his MFA from Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York. His photography has been published in Photo Metro, The Total Tattoo Book (Amy Krakow, Warner Books), and Black and White Photography, Manifest Visions/An International Collection (James Luciana, Quarry Books/Rockport Publishers). Santelli's fine art photography has been selected for numerous national and regional juried exhibitions, and he has work in many private collections. Permanent collections that contain his photographs include the Albany Institute of History and Art in Albany, New York; the Center for Photography in Woodstock, Kingston, New York; Wallace Memorial Library in Rochester, New York; and the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) in Dublin, Ireland
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