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Forbidden Photographs: The Life And Work Of Charles... : Review

FORBIDDEN PHOTOGRAPHS: THE LIFE AND WORK OF CHARLES GATEWOOD
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Charles Gatewood began shooting modern primitives, sadomasochists, tattooed men and women, nudists, radical sex pagans, bikers and other lifestyle outlaws four decades ago. Mainstream acceptance of alternative lifestyles has robbed many of his photos of the shock-value wallop they once packed, but Bill Macdonald's documentary portrait contains images — like the carousel of men suspended by dozens of hooks through their flesh — that won't be playing Peoria any time soon. The Texas-born photographer grew up in a tumultuous blue-collar household; his father, a serial womanizer, drank himself to death, and his mother heard voices. Gatewood left home as a teenager to be like Jack Kerouac and escape an abusive stepfather. Looking for a way to combine his artistic yearnings and his interest in cultural anthropology, he began taking pictures of largely undocumented American subcultures in the 1960s, supporting himself with magazine and newspaper work. Articulate and thoughtful, Gatewood admits that for the better part of 25 years he was deeply immersed in the wild life he chronicled; his drinking, drugging and carousing ("my craziness," he calls it) cost him his marriage, imperiled his health and estranged him from many friends and family members. Clean and sober for 15 years, the professorial-looking Gatewood continues to seek out and record startling behaviors: blood sports, suspension therapy (the guys hanging from hooks are working out traumas), fetish play and more, arguing fairly persuasively that his pictures constitute a collective portrait of communities in which inner lives are written on the body, rather than hidden away in the dark corners of the mind. Macdonald also interviews a variety of Gatewood's associates, ranging from porn-star-turned-sex-activist Annie Sprinkle to publisher V. Vale, whose Re/Search magazine issue on modern primitives helped introduce Gatewood's work to a wider audience. Ultimately the film is repetitive and some of the commentators verge on the fatuous — academic Daniel Lapin, in particular, is a windy bore — but Gatewood himself emerges as an amateur in the best sense of that word: someone who does what he does because he loves it. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
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