Tatau (1978“86) is a process of depiction also taking place in a restricted frame, this time (so the caption informs us) a suburban living-room in Auckland, New Zealand. But here there is no improvised costume; the bared human body, which is the object of the picture, is itself being "wrapped in images" [tr.] through the process of the traditional Samoan tatau. Recuperating the tattoo from the disembodied taxonomies of the colonial archive to document its visceral affirmation of individual and communal experience, photographer Mark Adams describes his gut-wrenching work as a self-conscious response to his being in a particular historical moment· "In 1978, New Zealand was not Polynesia. Fear existed as an undignified response to what we did not know"³·and to the emergent cross-cultural space that he began to observe and occupy at the time, drawn by his own desire to make images out of extreme experiences. With the artist and his subject·the interaction between the tattooist and his collaborators and the "victim" [sic]·we enter into the enactment of a tribal ordeal which is at once authentically alien yet radically altered by its new context. As Adams worked, incorporating himself into the boisterous social process of the tatau where reality is as much the sharing of the gruelling experience as where it is taking place, he found that the barrier between cultures itself was not fixed. If the Samoans he met carried on tatau as a means of affirming identity, some did so within a context they perceived to be a dislocated space; for others, the space shifted in time to become a new shared cultural space connecting the place of current reality with the event of historical determinacy. Alert to the fact that his position as the stranger within the frame entails a risky degree of slippage between what he says heËs doing and what is actually happening·that something which had once seemed in his experience to embody familiarity, to be known, had turned out to be unstable·Adams consumed the paradox, turning it to positive effect. "These six images define for me the limits of what I now think of as OK, more or less. And this may be partly because if Paulo [the tattooist] and his family and the other Samoans I now know were once what I did not know, they certainly are not that now. So, if the distance afforded by "othering" is reduced or removed by negotiation, perhaps the potency of the argument over who can represent whom diminishes proportionately. Or maybe it just doesnËt matter anymore."⁴