Badlands
by Charles Gatewood
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Book Summary Information
Author: Charles GatewoodEdition: Paperback
Audio: German (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2000-08-01
ISBN: 3980587649
Number of pages: 448
Publisher: Goliath Books
Book Reviews of Badlands
Book Review: Skilled photographer, boring result
Summary: 3 Stars
Badlands might as well be called Charles Gatewood's Greatest Hits, since the book is a collection of his most provocative, creative, sensual, and fascinating pictures. Gatewood's career began back in the 1960s, but his style hasn't really changed that much over the years. It's still black and white pictures of the "forbidden" that drives him, but it's not only sexual subjects that are featured in his work, even though it appears the kinky/fetish scene is his main interest.
As Gatewood himself makes clear during the interview at the end of the book, his ambitions have changed over the years. When he moved to New York in 1966, after having lived here in Sweden (Stockholm) for two years, he started working as a photographer for different magazines, and soon built up a reputation for being the man to hire in case the job had something to do with the shadowland of sex, drugs, and other taboos. In the beginning of his career Gatewood focused mostly on political themes, but as soon as he discovered the great subcultures of New York and San Francisco he realized where his true passions were.
Badlands is divided into different chapters, with names such as Piercing, Tattoo, Mardi Gras, Modern Primitives, True Blood, Wet Dreams, Fetish Girls, and so on. None of the pictures have sexual penetration in them, but that doesn't mean there's a lack of both male and female genitalia. Not one single picture is in color, and that works excellent. Still, the pictures in chapters such as True Blood and Messy, Messy, Messy sure could use some color, because blood simply doesn't look blood-like in black and white. I'm not saying black and white is worse than color (in fact, I think the opposite), but bloodplay gets a whole new perspective if you see something red on the model's skin and not something black.
The book has tons of amazing pictures to look at, but despite Gatewood's expertise the book still has a few downsides. First and foremost, in this case, size does indeed matter. Badlands is a meagre 14 x 19 centimetres, which is more or less the size of a normal Swedish paperback. This is a horrible size, because the pictures are beautiful and deserve to be printed in larger sizes.
I also have a problem with the fact that I get the feeling that "normal" portrait pictures are over represented. There's nothing wrong in portrait pictures, but considering the unique environments Gatewood frequents and the equally unique people he meets I cannot help but to feel somewhat left out when I "only" have a face to look at, no matter how many bizarre piercings or tattoos there are.
However, the greatest problem with the book is the lack of contexts; which unfortunately makes the pictures, no matter how beautiful and interesting they are, feel incomplete. Many of the pictures show bizarre and alternative individuals in bizarre and alternative environments and places, and some text accompanying at least some of the 401 pictures sure wouldn't hurt. But instead, all the reader gets is the name of the model and the place, and what year the picture was taken. This lack of context makes it difficult to fully appreciate the pictures, which truly sucks because most of them are truly masterpieces.
Summary of Badlands
Badlands is the most comprehensive book of cult photographer Charles Gatewood's images-and the best photo documentation of America s sexual underground: tough, sexy photos of society's self-chosen outcasts. For over three decades Gatewood has been photographing alternative lifestyles, beginning in the late sixties to the tattooed, pierced, SM fetish freaks of today. With the intensity of someone living the life right beside his subjects, Gatewood documented the changes in America, in western society. The radical discovery encoded in his photographs? That after the upheavals, dictatorships and revolutions, humans have returned to their roots. In Gatewood's photos, the individual reigns, the remains when there's nothing left but self. As realities, as documents, as works of art, Charles Gatewood s photos are snippets of the human condition -not dark, but on the trail of life.Gatewood, Charles Books
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