Fang-od Oggay (b.1920)
Buscalan, Tinglayan
2011

The Last Tattooed Women of Kalinga presents a series of portraits that laments and celebrates a dying tradition of tattooing in villages throughout the Cordillera mountains in the northern Philippines. For nearly a thousand years the Kalinga women have proudly worn these lace-like patterns or batok on their skin as symbols of beauty, wealth, stature and fortitude. Yet today this intricate form of self-adornment has largely been abandoned due to changing aesthetic perceptions.

Between 2009-2013, I traveled extensively with my 6x7 camera to document the last generation of women with the batok. The resulting pictures reveal the artistic designs of the tattoos, as well as their symbolic functions as signs of social belonging and testimonies to personal struggle and triumph in which the skin becomes a story.