Beneath the surface

Steven Burton took portraits of 27 gang members and spent 400 hours erasing their tattoos using Photoshop. The “before and after” photos are being published in the book Skin Deep along with interviews with the former gang members. [...] For the most heavily tattooed people, Burton says he had to imagine what lay beneath and recreate it. In some cases, the photographer had to take photos of himself and his friends and then overlay the subject's skin. He then painted in scars¹, moles² and the odd hairy chest. [...] The photographer, who now lives in New York, says he wants to humanise the people caught in gang culture. “When you think about gang members… it's all about the incarceration, the violence. It's not about the real people. I was interested in the human beings behind it”, he says. [...]

There were tears, laughter and disbelief. Many of the subjects had not seen themselves without a face and body full of tattoos for years. “Everybody had full-on emotional reactions because these tattoos are not fashion tattoos”, says Burton. “They have deep and personal meanings and a lot reflect a lot of the pain³ that these people went through.”

1. a mark from an injury 2. a brown dot on your skin 3. suffering