Pe'a at New Gallery

Michel Thieme by photographer Mark Adams.

The photographs in Mark Adams' Pe'a exhibition document the traditional Samoan rite of passage in which men have their thighs, buttocks and lower back tattooed without the aid of contemporary tools.

Adams has been photographing the ritual of receiving a pe'a since the 70s but he doesn't see his work as ethnographic documentation.

Although Adams' images show people on woven mats having their skin dramatically marked with combs and hammers, it was the non-traditional setting that caught his attention when he was first asked to photograph a pe'a in 1978.

"It was a commission for a magazine, Craft Australia, and I was really blown away by the thing [tattoo] because I'd never seen it before," says the pakeha artist.

"The impact was, like, this remarkable tattoo and the context - this Grey Lynn villa and this crazy wallpaper."

Adams' fascination was not in recording and preserving an ancient ritual but in showing it as part of the cross-cultural exchange of establishing identity in another country.

In the background of one image is the symbol of a more Western rite of passage; the scalloped-edge 21st key mirror. Alongside leis and flax mats are ashtrays and beer bottles, and most shots feature a television. This is Samoan life in suburban Auckland.

Some of the photos feature the late New Zealand painter Tony Fomison being tattooed.

Fomison and Adams established a close friendship with master tattooist Sulu'ape Paulo II, or Paul. Soon the observers became participants.

"[Fomison] had seen the photographs and we were both interested to meet this guy because, at one level, it was like an artist-to-artist thing."

Because matai consents were given, Adams says there have never been any cultural complications in his exhibiting or publishing the images.

"We got grant money from the Maori and South Pacific Arts Council, as it was in the early 80s, and to get that, we had to get the approval of Samoan community leaders and church leaders and matai."

Adams says his presence in the room was unmistakable, but this was never an issue.

"You're in a crowded space, you're in a Kiwi living room. It's not just the camera - the camera's really big - there's also a huge pile of lighting gear, so it's a real circus. The place becomes a bit like a film set.

"Paul and those guys are really easy going. It's not like you're in some precious, silent church space. It's noisy and Paul's cracking jokes and people are singing and coming and going.

"People assume that it's a private and sacred hidden thing - it's actually not. It's sacred in that sense but that doesn't mean that it can't be seen, and it's a democratic thing. When you're having it, everyone's there. There aren't really any prohibitions as to who can be there and who can't."

Although Adams has some small tattoos from Paulo, he says his interest never extended to receiving a pe'a. himself.

"It's not for me," he says. "I didn't want to take the full thing on. It'd probably kill me anyway. It nearly killed Tony a couple of times.

The most recent photos include images of people in Europe who received pe'a from Paulo and were taken after he died in 1999.

Although New Zealanders today would find little unusual about the multicultural context of Polynesian Auckland, the shifting of that discussion to Europe adds complexity. There is something unsettling about an Oceanic arts enthusiast in Amsterdam adding a pe'a to his collection of body adornments.

"The only people [in Europe] who've got them [pe'a] are people that he became close to like this guy Michel [Thieme] who assisted Paul a lot. That isn't necessarily immediately apparent in the photo and there's a lot of other things going on in the photo that are quite interesting," says Adams, referring to the fact that Thieme was later given the title of Sulu'ape by Paulo's family.

What: Pe'a by Mark Adams
Where and when: New Gallery to Nov 27