Albert Morse (Patreon)

In early 2020, an eBay seller began listing slides and negatives from Robin Ryan- a friend and personal photographer of tattoo legend Lyle Tuttle. Robin's photos documented a very special time in the development of modern Western tattoo culture, and like a lot of folks, I bid on every piece that I could. 

The negatives and slides I won have been sitting in a box in my archives for over a year- but we've recently dusted them off for a special project, and they'll be popping up here on SD every now and then. 

This scan features Albert Morse; not a tattooer himself, Morse was still responsible for a nodal moment in tattoo culture with the publication of his 1977 book The Tattooists. 

Morse was the son of a model who posed for Man Ray, and the grandson of a millionaire who earned the family fortune selling automatic donut making machines.

In 1968, he moved to San Francisco; he studied for his bar exam at the nudist section of Muir Beach, and joined the law firm of Rohann and Stepanian- a firm already famous for defending the Grateful Dead on drug offenses- where he met underground artists R. Crumb and Art Spiegelman. 

After a few years at Rohann and Stephanian, Morse opened his own firm and brought  R. Crumb with him as his most recognizable client. Morse vigorously sued to protect the copyright of Crumb’s designs from counterculture bootleggers, and the money he made on KEEP ON TRUCKIN allowed him to do pro-bono work for lesser known underground artists- he’d often accept artwork in trade for his services. Some of his underground comix clients immortalized him in their strips, leading Morse release a book of the compiled comix under the title of Morse's Funnies. 

He became fascinated with tattoo art, collecting photos  and postcards- which led him to photographing artists and clients for what would eventually become The Tattooists- finding publishing houses uninterested in tattoo content as there was no mainstream interest, he published the book himself.  It's said that he found tattoos both "fascinating and appalling."

He was also a collector of Oceanic art, and vintage chastity belts.

The Tattooists remains one of the best books on 1970s tattoo culture- if you're interested in picking up a copy, skip Amazon and support Book Mistress; Bezos has enough money.