\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n
DAVID:\u00a0 I want to talk to you about your work, and about the issues you have gotten into through your work.<\/p>\n
CHARLES:\u00a0 Well, we can use my newest book as a springboard.\u00a0 I\u2019ve just published a retrospective monograph of my favorite pictures about the body, Charles Gatewood Photographs:\u00a0 The Body and Beyond<\/em>.\u00a0 Here\u2019s what A.D. Coleman, the critic, says about it.\u00a0 He says, \u201cWhen Charles Gatewood began photographing America\u2019s sexual underground in the mid-1960\u2019s, he was considered by many to be an obsessed eccentric whose concerns were extremely marginal.\u00a0 Today, however, as public nudity, blatant exhibitionism, full body tattooing and piercing, and various forms of sadomasochistic excess have entered mainstream culture, Gatewood\u2019s photographs appear not only historically significant, but also uncannily prophetic.\u201d<\/p>\n DAVID:\u00a0 Do you feel prophetic?<\/p>\n CHARLES:\u00a0 Sure.\u00a0 When I started photographing all this material, I didn\u2019t know what I was doing.\u00a0 I was just following my own fascinations.\u00a0 A number of people told me quite pointedly that I shouldn\u2019t spend my time on such unimportant subject matter.\u00a0 Now that all this material is coming into the public eye, it validates me to a certain extent.<\/p>\n DAVID:\u00a0 What was the fascination for you when you began photographing this material?\u00a0 What was the original impulse you were following?<\/p>\n CHARLES:\u00a0 Intoxication.\u00a0 Doing this kind of photography makes me high.\u00a0 It makes me jump out of time and out of space into a magical world where everything flows, where I\u2019m excited and intoxicated and doing creative work at the same time.\u00a0 So, the real attraction for me, aside from making art, is getting intoxicated and transcending myself.<\/p>\n DAVID:\u00a0 But there are particular subjects that intrigue you in this way.<\/p>\n CHARLES:\u00a0 Sure.\u00a0 Certain subjects make me high — tattooing, piercing, Harley Davidsons, anything sexual, any kind of fetish stuff.\u00a0 I also get high on scenes — Mardi Gras, for example — the costumes and the posturing, the energy of the crowds.<\/p>\n DAVID:\u00a0 Is it the collective excitement of the group that gets to you?<\/p>\n CHARLES:\u00a0 At Mardi Gras there are a million drunk people in the streets, all masked and laughing.\u00a0 The energy really gets me going.\u00a0 It\u2019s not just the subject matter; it\u2019s also the energy of the event.<\/p>\n DAVID:\u00a0 What is it about these particular subjects and events?\u00a0 Many of your videos have titles like \u201cWeird San Francisco,\u201d \u201cWeird Amsterdam,\u201d \u201cWeird Mardi Gras.\u201d\u00a0 Is it the weirdness of things that interests you?<\/p>\n CHARLES:\u00a0 Well, if you\u2019re looking for a common thread you could say that these are all transcendental events and subjects.\u00a0 The people who interest me are looking to transcend themselves one way or another.\u00a0 When I try to document them with my camera, I transcend myself as well.\u00a0 I go to another place.\u00a0 Time stands still.\u00a0 I\u2019m totally into the moment.\u00a0 There\u2019s a flow, a feeling of wholeness that\u2019s fantastically incredible when I get it right.\u00a0 For a little while, I\u2019m gone.<\/p>\n DAVID:\u00a0 Is it the act of photographing, or is it the subject that\u2019s transcendent for you?\u00a0 Could you, say, be photographing landscapes and get to that transcendent place?<\/p>\n CHARLES:\u00a0 Well, I lived in the woods in Woodstock [New York] for ten years.\u00a0 I found that nature doesn\u2019t do that for me.\u00a0 My subject matter has always been strange, unusual people.\u00a0 That\u2019s what gets me off.<\/p>\n DAVID:\u00a0 Why is that?<\/p>\n CHARLES:\u00a0 It\u2019s probably because I\u2019m an addict.\u00a0 I come from a family of addicts and there are certain things that give me a fix, give me a buzz, give me a high.\u00a0 Photographing certain subjects is like taking a drug, what they call a mood-altering sensation.<\/p>\n DAVID:\u00a0 You\u2019re not just talking about photographing bodies.<\/p>\n CHARLES:\u00a0 It\u2019s not the body itself; it\u2019s usually the body in relation to some behavior.\u00a0 Usually it\u2019s the body manipulated, the body decorated, the body played with, the body deified, or vilified, or transformed, or made magical.\u00a0 That\u2019s why my new book is subtitled The Body and Beyond<\/em>.\u00a0 But almost all my best work goes back to the body in one way or another.\u00a0 This is the core of what I do.<\/p>\n DAVID:\u00a0 Would you say that the body is the medium, the path, through which some kinds of discoveries happen?<\/p>\n CHARLES:\u00a0 Yes, the body is the vehicle.\u00a0 My last book was called Primitives<\/em>.\u00a0 The subtitle was Tribal Body Art and the Left Hand Path<\/em>.\u00a0 Just the idea of a \u201cpath\u201d implies that there\u2019s some goal, some destination.\u00a0 The destination is transcendence, enlightenment, transformation.<\/p>\n Now there are plenty of examples of traditional or right-hand paths to transformation.\u00a0 The left-hand path is the path through the woods, the dark side.\u00a0 Most of my subjects are using the body as their vehicle and taking the left-hand path of suffering or mutilation or pain or some kind of self-denial to achieve transformation and transcendence.<\/p>\n DAVID:\u00a0 A particular kind of transformation.<\/p>\n CHARLES:\u00a0 Transformation through the body.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t believe in original sin.\u00a0 I don\u2019t believe the body is inherently evil, as some of the Christians tell us.\u00a0 I think the body is a beautiful thing; I think sexuality is a beautiful thing.\u00a0 People who use their bodies to transcend are doing wonderful work.\u00a0 Some of them, like Fakir Musafar, may be doing things that look dangerous or forbidden to the average person, but once you understand what he\u2019s doing, it makes sense.\u00a0 He\u2019s using the body as a vehicle in the same way that a lot of Indian fakirs have.<\/p>\n DAVID:\u00a0 Can you say more about what you mean by the \u201cleft-hand\u201d path?<\/p>\n CHARLES:\u00a0 There\u2019s a whole spiritual tradition of people who take the left-hand path.\u00a0 It involves going into the parts of the mind\/body\/spirit that are negative — the parts that are heavy, or dark, or black, or dangerous.\u00a0 People who follow the left-hand path believe in balancing dark and light, good and evil.\u00a0 A lot of new age people don\u2019t believe in exploring the dark side.\u00a0 They talk about living in the light.\u00a0 Many of them are in denial about their dark sides.<\/p>\n We all have light and dark in us.\u00a0 If you\u2019re brave enough, it\u2019s good to explore both, to integrate them, rather than just trying to have sweetness and light all the time.\u00a0 It\u2019s good to acknowledge and know something about darkness, what people are calling the shadow.<\/p>\n DAVID:\u00a0 All the feelings and desires we don\u2019t like to admit we have.<\/p>\n CHARLES:\u00a0 Right.\u00a0 The normal range of emotions includes anger and hate and jealousy and rage and revenge and a lot of feelings that people would rather not deal with.\u00a0 The left-hand path assumes it\u2019s good to go into those negative spaces, to get to know them and integrate them with the \u201cpositive\u201d side.\u00a0 I\u00a0 ran this down in the text I wrote for Primitives<\/em> as well as I could.<\/p>\n DAVID:\u00a0 How does sex fit into all this?\u00a0 Do you see your work as sex-related?\u00a0 Your work incorporates a lot of sexual energy, and yet you haven\u2019t published much photography of people actually being sexual.<\/p>\n CHARLES:\u00a0 Well, as you know, sex is about a lot more than putting the peg in the hole.\u00a0 Most of my work deals with sexual energy in one way or another.\u00a0 It might simply be the energy you feel when you see a certain fetish look — leather or piercings or tattoos or spike-heeled boots.\u00a0 It might be a certain kind of sexual posturing, a certain sexual magnetism or attraction that\u2019s hard to put into words.\u00a0 But there\u2019s a sexual chemistry that I try to capture in my pictures.<\/p>\n DAVID:\u00a0 What is it that makes these particular looks, these presentations of self, sexual?<\/p>\n CHARLES:\u00a0 These looks and stances and decorations say, \u201cHi there; I\u2019m alive and I\u2019m erotic.\u00a0 I\u2019m hot, I\u2019m sizzling, I\u2019m vibrating in a certain way, and it makes you excited, doesn\u2019t it, to see that?\u201d<\/p>\n I\u2019m a visual artist.\u00a0 I get most of my kicks through my eyes.\u00a0 I see erotic vibrations all over the place, all the time.<\/p>\n DAVID:\u00a0 Are you saying that everything, everywhere, has a sexual dimension to it?\u00a0 Are some things that are more specifically sexual than others?<\/p>\n CHARLES:\u00a0 I just know that if I go out to photograph Mardi Gras and hit Bourbon Street, I\u2019ll get a certain kind of picture and a certain kind of buzz.\u00a0 My work is not about theory, it\u2019s about immediate experience.\u00a0 It may be explicitly sexual; it may be implicitly sexual.\u00a0 It may just be getting into a good crowd during the Folsom Street Fair and rubbing up against some leather or smelling some sweat.\u00a0 I can get intensely turned on by things that wouldn\u2019t turn most people on at all.<\/p>\n We\u2019re into the fetish area now:\u00a0 spike-heeled boots, chains, bare skin, piercings and tattoos, tight clothes, leather.\u00a0 There\u2019s also watching people be sexual.\u00a0 And there\u2019s looking at other people\u2019s photos or videos or films, about people being erotic.\u00a0 That\u2019s also an intense turn-on to me, especially amateur photos and videos.<\/p>\n DAVID:\u00a0 Are you calling whatever puts you in that turned on state \u201csexual\u201d?<\/p>\n CHARLES:\u00a0 Well, I\u2019m talking specifically about sex now.\u00a0 Sometimes when I\u2019m in nature, and the sun\u2019s setting on the river, and I\u2019m in a really relaxed frame of mind, I\u2019ll start to feel a union that\u2019s very much like what the mystics call transcendental experiences.\u00a0 Now, you might call that sexual, too.\u00a0 There\u2019s a definite union there.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t mean I have a hard on necessarily, but it means I feel totally plugged in and at one with everything.\u00a0 I guess you could say I\u2019m being sexual with the universe then.<\/p>\n But I get the same kind of transcendental zing photographing a wet t-shirt contest.\u00a0 Time stands still.\u00a0 I feel one with it all, excited, creative.\u00a0 I feel union.\u00a0 You can get just as intoxicated on a disco floor as you can at a prayer meeting, maybe even more so.\u00a0 I suspect that more people get transcendental kicks in the vernacular way than in the sacred way.\u00a0 It\u2019s just as valid to get transcendent at a wet t-shirt contest as it is to do that at a prayer meeting.<\/p>\n DAVID:\u00a0 Do you see your work as sexual?<\/p>\n CHARLES:\u00a0 No, sex is just one of the things I deal with.\u00a0 Calling my work forbidden would cover the waterfront a little better.\u00a0 Almost everything I do is somehow against the rules.<\/p>\n I started doing photography when the 60\u2019s were exploding.\u00a0 It was obvious to me that that was meant to be my life\u2019s work.\u00a0 It never occurred to me to photograph anything else.<\/p>\n I was drawn to people who were breaking the rules and behaving in ways that nobody had ever tried before.\u00a0 All sorts of revolutions were going down:\u00a0 the black revolution, the women\u2019s revolution, the sexual revolution, the drug revolution.\u00a0 Everything was changing.\u00a0 People were behaving in wonderful new ways that were illegal, supposedly immoral, or both.\u00a0 That\u2019s still what I photograph.\u00a0 There\u2019s a straight line from 1964, when I bought my first camera, to now.\u00a0 I\u2019ve spent 30 years photographing people who have decided to break the rules.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t think of myself as an erotic photographer.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think about taking great sexual pictures, although I\u2019m really drawn to erotica.\u00a0 I do think of myself as a photographer of the forbidden, a photographer of the underground, where people are encouraged to drop their masks or change their identities to get out of their heads and transcend themselves.<\/p>\n DAVID:\u00a0 In that sense your work is about madness — madness in the sense of going beyond the boundaries of what\u2019s considered normal or sane or rational.<\/p>\n CHARLES:\u00a0 Definitely.\u00a0 Before I decided to call my first book Sidetripping<\/em>, I called it A Gentle Madness<\/em>.\u00a0 I wanted to show all the different faces of transcendence — the wise ones, the crazy ones, the weird ones, the new ones, the old ones.\u00a0 I was trying to compare and contrast the craziness of the hippies with the craziness of what they were rebelling against, letting the viewer make up his mind…<\/p>\n DAVID:\u00a0 …where the real craziness was.<\/p>\n CHARLES:\u00a0 Exactly.\u00a0 On one page would be hippies tripping out at Carnival; on the opposite page, their parents doing something just as bizarre.\u00a0 So, yes, I guess madness and deviance have always been my real subjects.<\/p>\n My academic background is in anthropology.\u00a0 I\u2019ve always asked, \u201cWhy are these people behaving this way?\u201d\u00a0 But normal behavior — the right-hand path — doesn\u2019t interest me.\u00a0 There are, for example, lots of body modifications besides tattooing and piercing and dressing up in leather.\u00a0 There\u2019s body-building and liposuction and plastic surgery.\u00a0 I leave it for other people to study the Good Housekeeping path.\u00a0 I study and follow the left-hand path, which implies deviance and darkness, pain and danger.<\/p>\n DAVID:\u00a0 How is your interest in strangeness different from thrill-seeking sensationalism?\u00a0 Are you out to simply shock people, or is there more to it than that?<\/p>\n CHARLES:\u00a0 Well, I came into this work on the level of kicks and thrill-seeking.\u00a0 I started photographing tattoos, and through the tattoo underground I found out about piercing.\u00a0 Those subjects had a fetish interest for me that made me very hot.\u00a0 But then a surprising thing happened:\u00a0 I started finding other levels of meaning in what was going on.<\/p>\n Before long, I was doing more than just taking pictures.\u00a0 I started getting involved with my subjects.\u00a0 I started participating.\u00a0 I started experiencing things I\u2019d never experienced before.\u00a0 I made changes in my lifestyle, and that\u2019s continued to this day.\u00a0 You could say that my photography is changing my whole life now.\u00a0 I\u2019m not just taking pictures any more; I\u2019m living a lifestyle.<\/p>\n DAVID:\u00a0 Is your photography anthropological, like Robert Mapplethorpe\u2019s?\u00a0 Are you saying, \u201cLet me show you what people do.\u201d<\/p>\n CHARLES:\u00a0 Yes, very much.\u00a0 I still have a lot of naivety that comes from growing up in a radically different time and different place.\u00a0 I\u2019m still shocked and amazed and delighted by a lot of what I see, to the point that I\u2019ll go running down the street after it with my camera.\u00a0 Something like the Folsom Street Fair is fascinating and wonderful to me.\u00a0 Or a big biker convention in Daytona Beach.\u00a0 Or Mardi Gras, or New Year\u2019s Eve at Times Square.\u00a0 Many people would run away from these sorts of scenes, but my excitement is as strong as ever.\u00a0 They make me intoxicated.<\/p>\n DAVID:\u00a0 Would it intoxicate you the same way to be at, say, a Nazi gathering?\u00a0 That\u2019s also a bunch of people breaking out of the mold.<\/p>\n CHARLES:\u00a0 It might.\u00a0 Any time people do something forbidden, a lot of energy is released, and that\u2019s the energy that gets me going.\u00a0 I think I probably could get just as high at a Nazi rally or a Klan rally.\u00a0 It would just be a different twist on the same thing, the sense of being in the middle of something that\u2019s forbidden.<\/p>\n DAVID:\u00a0 So your work announces that there all these groups of people collectively encouraging each other to discover creative, elaborate ways to break out of The Way It\u2019s Spozed to Be.\u00a0 Your work is itself part of that process of change.\u00a0 Turning something into art offers people mind-opening possibilities they wouldn\u2019t otherwise have.\u00a0 Once the word is out that what\u2019s going on is rich and complex, new people are going to get fascinated.\u00a0 It seems to me that art has a unique way of breaking through stereotypes and speaking about the complexities of otherness.<\/p>\n CHARLES:\u00a0 You\u2019ve hit on something that\u2019s really central about what I\u2019m doing.\u00a0 My work has always been about documenting incredible subcultures — like 100,000 Harley Davidson guys at Bike Week; or what\u2019s really happening on Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras that they don\u2019t show you on television; or what it\u2019s like to go to be naked with a bunch of nudists in the middle of some sexploitational beauty contest; or going to a piercing party in a gay underground club.<\/p>\n Mainstream totally ignores the real stuff going on in these scenes.\u00a0 Cameras shoot acceptable pictures for Channel 7, but never the good stuff, and a lot of events are completely blacked out by the media, either because they don\u2019t think there\u2019s popular interest in them, or because the people who decide these things don\u2019t want people to know what\u2019s going on.<\/p>\n Take the Folsom Street Fair, the biggest street fair in San Francisco.\u00a0 It\u2019s attended by tens of thousands of people, but there\u2019s not one word written about it in establishment newspapers.\u00a0 Why is such an important event blacked out?\u00a0 Scenes like this are incredibly fascinating, but until recently the average person hasn\u2019t been told about them and hasn\u2019t wanted to know.<\/p>\n Recently a lot of these scenes have begun to percolate into the mainstream.\u00a0 Somebody in the establishment has figured out that they can make money marketing the underground — turning underground events into trends, selling products and services.\u00a0 Now, all of a sudden, you turn on MTV and you have tattooed and pierced guys in Harley Davidson drag talking about the scene they did with three other people last night.\u00a0 It\u2019s all there — the sexual underground, the bikers, the s&m crowd, the exhibitionist factor, the kinky sex people — zooming its way into the mainstream.<\/p>\n DAVID:\u00a0 Why is that happening now?<\/p>\n CHARLES:\u00a0 The public is finally getting what it wants.\u00a0 Sooner or later, if the public wants something, somebody\u2019s going to serve it up to them.<\/p>\n DAVID:\u00a0 What does the public want?<\/p>\n CHARLES:\u00a0 People want to be titillated in new ways, amused and entertained in new ways.\u00a0 People are bored with formula, and they\u2019re bored with control.\u00a0 When you turn on television, even today, everything is packaged and shaped and plastic.\u00a0 There\u2019s very little on tv that\u2019s real.\u00a0 Anything that\u2019s fresh and different and real is being gobbled up.<\/p>\n DAVID:\u00a0 You mention control.\u00a0 Is going out of control part of what makes all this interesting to the public?\u00a0 Take all the fascination with modern primitivism, or Robert Bly\u2019s wild man.\u00a0 Is the current interest in wildness a reaction against being overcivilized and self-controlled all the time?\u00a0 Is there a fascination with going out of control, which gets back to madness?<\/p>\n CHARLES:\u00a0 Definitely.\u00a0 Burroughs talks a lot about the control machine.\u00a0 Control is a central idea in his work, and it\u2019s a central idea in my work too.<\/p>\n The hippies were the first to say, \u201cLet\u2019s throw off a lot of this civilization and conformity, let\u2019s throw off this nonsense about our bodies being evil.\u00a0 Let\u2019s celebrate, let\u2019s dance, let\u2019s fuck, let\u2019s live<\/em> with a big L, let\u2019s experience, let\u2019s wear bright colors and bells and beads, let\u2019s explore mystical and magical paths.\u00a0 People think that 60\u2019s energy is gone, but it\u2019s still going on in many ways.<\/p>\n The Deadheads are alive and well; there are hundreds of thousands of them.\u00a0 They have their look and their ideas, their communication system, their music, their belief system, their rituals.\u00a0 You could say the same for the gays, for blacks, for bikers, for the psychedelic underground, the artistic and literary underground, the sexual underground, s&m.\u00a0 Everybody\u2019s getting really good at what they do, at being who they are.<\/p>\n Each group has gotten its shit together and become a well-organized tribe.\u00a0 Each tribe has become more complete, self-supporting, and full-blown.\u00a0 The subcultures are becoming full-blown cultures.\u00a0 They\u2019re still outside the establishment, but each one is full-blown.<\/p>\n Take a look at the film, The Piano<\/em>.\u00a0 The main guy is a primitive; he\u2019s got a tattooed face.\u00a0 It\u2019s come to the point that the public can accept a feature film where a credible leading man has a tattooed face.\u00a0 And part of the current fascination with primitivism is the idea that there\u2019s eroticism that\u2019s over the edge, that\u2019s more than modern society allows, that\u2019s dangerous.<\/p>\n DAVID:\u00a0 Primitives have always been seen as embodying forbidden sexuality.\u00a0 I think people sense a wildness that has been lost and needs to be reclaimed.<\/p>\n CHARLES:\u00a0 Yes.\u00a0 You could include people like Robert Bly and Joseph Campbell for sure.\u00a0 All the men going into sweat lodges and drumming groups — expressing their feelings, passing the talking stick, beating on drums, sobbing and hugging each other.\u00a0 There was no tradition for white men to do this.\u00a0 There\u2019s also a huge rise in neo-pagan activities.\u00a0 Wicca people are looking at the old religions.\u00a0 Spiritual communities are popping up all over the place.\u00a0 It\u2019s the same story:\u00a0 People are tired of the control of the church hierarchy.\u00a0 They want to get back to the original spark, the feeling and the emotion.\u00a0 They want something more moving and more authentic than the tired old dogmas of a bunch of old white guys.<\/p>\n DAVID:\u00a0 Do you see your work as spiritual?<\/p>\n CHARLES:\u00a0 When I started photographing these kinds of behavior, I didn\u2019t think of it as spiritual at all, but now I do.\u00a0 Of course, some people get pierced as a fashion statement.\u00a0 Some people get tattooed because everybody else is doing it and it\u2019s a way to fit in.\u00a0 Some people join pagan groups because they think they\u2019re going to meet sexy girls.\u00a0 But I think most people who are drawn to these movements have some transcendental purpose, whether they know it or not.<\/p>\n DAVID:\u00a0 Do you try, specifically, to show the deeper meanings in the behaviors you photograph?<\/p>\n CHARLES:\u00a0 I want to show that there\u2019s a lot more going on than people might think at first.\u00a0 People think my subjects are stupid, or that what they do really has no meaning aside from rebellion.\u00a0 I like to break the stereotypes and show that many of my subjects are smart, articulate, conscious people who are going somewhere, growing in ways they couldn\u2019t grow in their straight lives.<\/p>\n DAVID:\u00a0 As you said, a number of fringe phenomena — piercing, tattooing, the sexual underground — are now moving into mainstream American culture.\u00a0 Does all this simply get co-opted into the American mania?\u00a0 I think work like your photography helps people think about body modification, tattooing, piercing in richer ways than they would otherwise.<\/p>\n CHARLES:\u00a0 Just this week in The New York Times<\/em> fashion supplement, there was a model wearing a gold clip-on navel ring, trying to look like she had a pierced navel.\u00a0 That\u2019s what The New York Times<\/em> wants to show us — piercing as the latest fashion.\u00a0 Playboy, which is now very much an establishment magazine, has finally gotten around to reporting that people are getting pierced, and piercing more than just their ears.<\/p>\n On the other hand, anybody who\u2019s really interested in the subject can find their way to Modern Primitives<\/em>, the Re\/Search book.\u00a0 If you sit down and spend some time with that book, it\u2019s going to change your thinking in real ways.\u00a0 It\u2019s fun knowing that my work has changed a lot of people\u2019s thinking and behavior.\u00a0 That\u2019s not just photography for photography\u2019s sake; that\u2019s affecting cultural change.\u00a0 Because I followed my fascination, some guy in Ohio is getting his dick pierced.<\/p>\n I feel good about that, but sometimes it\u2019s also a little scary because once you let the toothpaste out of the tube you can\u2019t put it back in.\u00a0 What if this keeps going?\u00a0 What if everybody gets his dick pierced?\u00a0 The point is that we don\u2019t know what it might lead to.\u00a0 I\u2019m not sure I want to be responsible for all that, but it\u2019s too late.<\/p>\n DAVID:\u00a0 You\u2019ve said that people who used to consider your photos weird aren\u2019t shocked by them in the same way these days.\u00a0 Do you miss being the total renegade?<\/p>\n CHARLES:\u00a0 Yeah, in a way.\u00a0 When the establishment takes something really vital and sells it to Middle America, they take a lot of the magic out of it.\u00a0 People look at some of my strongest pictures and say, \u201cOh, I saw something like that on tv last week.\u201d\u00a0 But what they saw was a watered down version of what I\u2019m showing.<\/p>\n DAVID:\u00a0 What didn\u2019t they see?<\/p>\n CHARLES:\u00a0 They didn\u2019t see the real thing.\u00a0 In my videos of body art people in the Bay Area, for example, I ask people why they do what they do.\u00a0 99 out of a hundred talk about totem animals, or regaining personal power through rediscovery of their bodies, or rebalancing and rebirthing and reclaiming, or confirmational magic.\u00a0 These things are way more than skin deep, but you don\u2019t get that from what you see on tv.<\/p>\n DAVID:\u00a0 Are other photographers doing bogus versions of the work you do?\u00a0 Are there people cashing in on the phenomenon without really understanding it?<\/p>\n CHARLES:\u00a0 Nobody is doing what I\u2019m doing.\u00a0 If you want information on body piercing, you\u2019ve got to go underground.\u00a0 You\u2019ve got to go to the sources, to somebody like me who\u2019s been studying it for 15 years, to find out what\u2019s happening.<\/p>\n I get a lot of calls from media types who want to exploit both me and the phenomenon.\u00a0 I get calls from people who say, \u201cWe have a tv talk show and we want you to line up several beautiful tattooed women so that we can do our talk show based on a conversation with them.\u201d\u00a0 Usually I tell them to get lost because I\u2019m not interested in sharing what I know on that level.\u00a0 The media is always looking for a cheap shot to exploit, make some money, and get on to the next thing.\u00a0 They\u2019re usually not interested in any depth coverage.<\/p>\n At the same time that all these people are clamoring to get what I\u2019ve got for their<\/em> purposes, nobody wants to publish my work.\u00a0 I still publish my own books.\u00a0 No commercial publisher will touch what I\u2019ve got, with the exception of Re\/Search.<\/p>\n DAVID:\u00a0 Having done this for 30 years, is it getting old?<\/p>\n CHARLES:\u00a0 No, it\u2019s as fresh as ever.\u00a0 What I\u2019m doing is photographing basic 60\u2019s energy that keeps coming around in different forms.\u00a0 The girl on the cover of Primitives<\/em> is a flower child 30 years later.\u00a0 Her armband is a tattooed band of dolphins now; she\u2019s got a crystal hanging from a pierced nipple.\u00a0 Some of her costume is 90\u2019s, but she\u2019s still basically a 60\u2019s flower child hippie girl.\u00a0 Because I\u2019m learning from it all on deeper and deeper levels, personally the revelations are more and more satisfying over time, to the point where a lot of times now when I put the camera away and just join the dance.<\/p>\n In social scientific research, you\u2019re never supposed to join the dance.\u00a0 An LSD researcher could never take the drug because that would compromise the study.\u00a0 But until you take the drug you\u2019re never going to know what people are talking about.\u00a0 The insider may not be objective any more, but he can show you the textures and richness and levels of experience much more deeply than a voyeur.<\/p>\n DAVID:\u00a0 When you compare your more recent work to your older photos, what difference do you see between the outsider\u2019s and the insider\u2019s pictures?<\/p>\n CHARLES:\u00a0 My subjects are much more relaxed with me.\u00a0 I\u2019ve worked really hard to put my subjects at ease.\u00a0 To do that I have to be able to speak their language and know their references.\u00a0 I have to be able to assure them that I\u2019m not threatening, that I understand, that I\u2019m sympathetic to what they\u2019re doing, that I\u2019m excited<\/em> and interested in what they\u2019re doing, that I think they\u2019re important<\/em> and fascinating, that I\u2019m there to celebrate them.<\/p>\n Being able to put them at ease so that they\u2019re not defensive is the most important part of what I do.\u00a0 Anybody can push the button and take a portrait.\u00a0 The work before pushing is the really hard thing.<\/p>\n DAVID:\u00a0 How do you find people to photograph?<\/p>\n CHARLES:\u00a0 People call me, believe it or not.\u00a0 Every week somebody calls, saying, \u201cI\u2019m a friend of so and so or, \u201cI\u2019m doing so and so.\u201d\u00a0 Strange things come in the mail; strange invitations come over the phone.\u00a0 People want to work with me who haven\u2019t even met me.\u00a0 That\u2019s gratifying.<\/p>\n DAVID:\u00a0 Don\u2019t you have a desire to go do something entirely different?<\/p>\n CHARLES:\u00a0 What would I do?\u00a0 No, this is my turf.\u00a0 I\u2019m going to keep studying American subcultures.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve been doing a lot of nudes, portraits, and erotica lately, things that are a bit more sexually explicit, a bit more forbidden, I guess.\u00a0 I\u2019ve always drawn a line and excluded erotica.\u00a0 I\u2019ve only photographed people having sex a few times.\u00a0 My work is strange enough; I didn\u2019t want it mixed up with porn.\u00a0 But now I\u2019m kind of interested in that interface.<\/p>\n I sell about 5000 videos a year; mostly tattoo and piercing videos.\u00a0 Most people who buy my videos are interested in piercing as a new kind of kink, I think.\u00a0 Most of these are horny men in small towns.<\/p>\n DAVID:\u00a0 Jacking off to people getting pierced?<\/p>\n CHARLES:\u00a0 Well, that\u2019s what they think<\/em> they\u2019re doing.\u00a0 That\u2019s the entry level.\u00a0 But my videos are kind of educational, actually — people talking about what they\u2019re doing and why.\u00a0 Most buyers order several tapes at once, so by the time they finish watching them all, they\u2019ve been educated a little bit.\u00a0 They probably still jerk off, which is fine.<\/p>\n People are bored with the standard forms of sexual video expression.\u00a0 They\u2019re looking for something new and different — something hot, kinky, fun, exciting.\u00a0 They\u2019re not satisfied with what\u2019s being served up to them.\u00a0 There\u2019s a hunger out there.\u00a0 It\u2019s more than an erotic hunger — it\u2019s a spiritual hunger.\u00a0 There\u2019s kind of a free-floating anxiety, a sense that something\u2019s not right, that something\u2019s missing.<\/p>\n DAVID:\u00a0 Are your videos pagan porn?<\/p>\n CHARLES:\u00a0 (Laughs)\u00a0 Pagan erotica<\/em>, yes.\u00a0 We have a new generation of seekers.\u00a0 They may come to these subjects on a really profane level and find something sacred in them.<\/p>\n DAVID:\u00a0 So you\u2019re being subversive, in a way.<\/p>\n CHARLES:\u00a0 Well, maybe I\u2019m opening some new possibilities to them.\u00a0 Maybe something magical will happen that they didn\u2019t expect.\u00a0 I would feel really good about that.\u00a0 There\u2019s a reason that most people are doing this and it goes way beyond fashion.\u00a0 It\u2019s about rediscovery, rebirth, change, growth, personal development, and magical transformation.<\/p>\n [For more information about Charles Gatewood\u2019s books (Sidetripping with William S. Burroughs, Primitives, Charles Gatewood Photographs<\/em>) and videos (30 titles, including Erotic Tattooing and Body Piercing, Painless Steel, Heavenly Bodies, Weird Amsterdam, Weird Thailand<\/em>), send name, address, and an age statement to Flash Productions, Box 410052, San Francisco, CA 94141.]<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Spectator<\/em>, August 4-11, 1995<\/p>\n Copyright \u00a9 1995 David Steinberg<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n DAVID: I want to talk to you about your work, and about the issues you have gotten into through your work.<\/p>\n CHARLES: Well, we can use my newest book as a springboard. I\u2019ve just published a retrospective monograph of my favorite pictures about the body, Charles Gatewood Photographs: The Body and Beyond. Here\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1353","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other-essays","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1353"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1353\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}