Being a physical experience that challenges sensitive and social taboos, body marking with tattoos and body piercing has been fairly explored in the public sphere regarding the issues of voluntary pain and the risks of individual and public health that are involved. Associated with the moral panic that is already linked to these practices, which are related to behaviours perceived as socially deviant, psychopathological or criminal, comes another type of social panic, the «hygienist panic», connected with a fear of contracting infectious and contagious diseases, or of having a bad reaction to the incorporated materials and inks. Attempting to go beyond these discourses, this article aims to analyse: on one hand, how current consumers of tattoos and body piercing deal with the pain associated with these practices, what emotions frame that sensation and what strategies are used in its control; on the other hand, how the producers of tattoos and body piercing, considering their new and extended clientele, deal with the demands for sanitary disciplines regarding their professional practice. As for methodological procedures, the empiric information presented in the article was collected through in-depth biographical interviews conducted with people who had extensively marked bodies, multi-tattooed and multi-pierced, professionals or only consumers of tattoos and body piercing. Fifteen interviewees with different social profiles were recruited in tattoo and body piercing studios located in Lisbon and on its outskirts, after an intensive ethnographic fieldwork in those spaces.

Quando o meu avô regressou da emigração, trouxe com ele o álbum de fotografias da família, vazio. Do Rio de Janeiro volta ao norte de Portugal: nasce a família e compõe-se as páginas. O objecto, central à fotografia doméstica, é a projecção da própria imagem do núcleo afectivo. Através da linguagem universal e dos rituais que o caracterizam, o álbum fotográfico da Família Martins é um retroceder à própria imagem individual e a uma reflexão acerca dos processos de memória a que qualquer arquivo é sujeito. Da esfera privada para o espaço público, “Álbum” propõe uma nova leitura do género vernacular, equiparando-o ao discurso fotográfico oficial.