Charles Gatewood
Directing
Biography
Charles Gatewood was a photographer, writer, videographer, artist and educator, who lived and worked in San Francisco, California. His work mapped, provocatively and disturbingly, the subcultures of strippers, sex-club devotees, bikers, body piercers and fetishists.
Born: November 8, 1942
Known For
Charles Gatewood's Weird Thailand
Charles Gatewood's tour video of the weird and wild in southeast Asia. Featuring sex shows, opium smoking, primitive piercing rituals, spitting cobras and "Exotic Erotic Bangkok, Sin City of Asia!".
Charles Gatewood's Forbidden Photographs
Photographer Charles Gatewood offers insight and comments on a variety of his work. His subjects include exhibitionism, transvestites, fetishism, scenes from Mardi Gras, and body modification such as tattoos, body piercing, and extreme weight gain.
Once the Toothpaste Is Out of the Tube - An Art Apart: Charles Gatewood
American photographer Charles Gatewood started out in the 1960s as a young man with dreams of showing the world the radical cultural developments that were going on in his country. He met many of the iconic instigators of change and documented them for posterity. As the decades passed, Gatewood drifted more and more into a personal expression of sexual subcultures, both in America and abroad. His powerful photos of pioneers within the tattooing- and piercing scenes helped pave the way for the movement that was to be called "Modern Primitives". It's a classic example of when art, and in this example, specifically photography, merges with its general environment and takes on new forms that are impossible to stop. Or, as the San Francisco based photographer himself describes it: "Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, you can't put it back".
The Gates of Gomorrah
Shutters click in this clothes-dropping exhibition of photographic exposures sure to quicken the pulse of those in need of extremity expansion. The voice of artistic reason rises above orgiastic visuals that splash across the pages of glue-bound volumes oozing with sticky subjects of a carnal persuasion. Come and rejoice in the mayhem and frivolity that only Eros unchained can deliver. The soiled and the damned live again on the glossy pages of glue-bound tabloids ticketed for hell and beyond. Witness the innocent and the fun-loving as they become documented fodder for light sensitive materials too hot to handle. Get down and dirty with a deluge of messy mischief destined to flood your libido with a backwash of coffee table books that will titillate and terrify. Meet the man behind the mayhem and marvel at the clarity of it all. It’s also a cake-bashing, birthday celebration.