Charles Gatewood photo exhibition in San Francisco

One of my favorite living photographers, Charles Gatewood, is best known for documenting the sexual underground, from extreme fetishists to modern primitives. In the 1970s though, Gatewood explored a very different kinky scene: Wall Street. Gatewood describes those documentary images, some of my absolute favorites from his body of work, as "formal and forbidding, providing a visual metaphor for a more secretive perversion, high finance." The Wall Street series, along with some of his incredibly provocative early photos of the sexual underground, will be shown at San Francisco's Robert Tat Gallery in an exhibition opening this Thursday, February 7, and running through March 29. For those unable to visit the gallery, Gatewood's work from this period can also be seen at the gallery's Web site and the artist's own site. Link to online gallery, Link to Gatewood's site (NSFW)

[#1 posted by Dav , February 6, 2008 8:54 AM]

My wife and I attended a photography lecture he held at Good Vibrations once. He showed slides of his work and talked some about the process but mostly just told stories about the people involved and how he was capturing some real underground movements. The most memorable story was about Fakir Musafar a Silicon Valley executive who was secretly the leading force in the emergent body modification scene in American culture. Looking forward to this show, he had some great stuff.

[#2 posted by David Pescovitz , February 6, 2008 9:03 AM]

Yes, Charles has fantastic stories. He's like a photographic anthropologist. He doesn't judge his subjects and he tries his best not to interfere, but rather uses his camera to report on what he sees.