With its seven hundred pages of A4 pictures, interviews, performances and personalities, Sang Bleu is an unwieldy, limited-edition tome, a monolith in the specialized press.
Zineland covers photographers and artists who chose, at the beginning of the 2000s, to return to paper and the organic. Sang Bleu could be the perfect embodiment of this generation of ink lovers, since the publication, founded in 2004 and now releasing its sixth issue, is devoted to contemporary artistic culture, with a focus on tattoos.
One opens the pages of Sang Bleu the way one would enter a crypt to meet an underground community ruled by symbols. In the world of tattoos, the magazine is an enigmatic force. Tattoos have long been a source of inspiration for photographers—it inspired Robert Doisneau in one of his rare dark works—and the sixth issue of Sang Bleu shows the latest developments of the medium with a series of photographs (Ellen von Unwerth contributes one of her rare colors series), interviews and tattoos selections, all of it woven together with a bold and cutting art direction, featuring a wide variety of contributors.
Antoine Soubrier
Sang Bleu
70 euros, Limited edition.
