The Body Beautiful
In her famous self-portrait, photographer Matuschka gave the world its first look at mastectomy. Now she explains how she turned herself into a work of art.
By Matuschka
I never wanted a tattoo. Not even by the time I’d booked the session. It was the summer of 1968, and my friend, Nona, and I were two unruly nymphets hanging out with a motorcycle club whose rite of initiation involved engraving your man’s name on your belly. I was only 13, so I needed a fake ID and Nona to chauffeur me across state lines, since tattoos were illegal in New Jersey at the time.
We went to a guy named “Danny” who operated a tattoo parlor out of his parents’ garage. His needles were the size of hypodermic syringes, and the ink he would use on my body looked like a mixture of soot, cigarette ash and motor oil.
“So what do you want me to put on you today?”
“I want my name, Joanne, with a little red heart, right here above my hip-hugger line.”
“Your name?” Nona protested.
“Yes, my name.” Though I saw myself as a young, raw and beautiful hoodlum, inscribing “Rockaway Dave” across my stomach was a bit of a push.
“Two dollars, please.”
When Danny started poking and tapping the needles deep under my skin, I became so delirious from the pain that I imagined I was getting a root canal and the dentist’s drill slipped. For a moment I panicked: What if I don’t like his handwriting?
“Cool, man. Cool,” Nona said an hour later as we sped back on the New York State Thruway to make it home in time for the 6 o’clock dinner bell.
The following day I was so uncomfortable that I almost ripped the tattoo off through the sheer violence of my rubbing and scratching. The mound of scab and crust itched, oozed and bled for many days. When it healed, people thought the tattoo was a fat, black alligator or a dead insect. The placement was poor, and when men pulled my pants down and read Joanne, many of them thought I was gay.
Seven years later I was a fashion model going by only my last name. In the ’70s and ’80s, it was rare for a model to have either breasts or tattoos. I had both. I knew there was no intrinsic beauty in this tattoo, and the modeling agents and photographers thought the same way, but I couldn’t afford the laser surgery to remove it.
