Forbidden Photographs

Award-winning San Francisco photographer and anthropologist Charles Gatewood, has spent the past 40 years observing, documenting, and authoring books and programs about the American underground. The camera follows Gatewood from wild Manhattan S&M parties to San Francisco’s infamous Folsom Street Fair, to the incendiary artistry of Nevada’s Burning Man Celebration, and into the secret world of outlaw bikers, fetishists, pagans, vampires, BDSM practitioners and enthusiasts of radical body modification. Images from his book Sidetripping (with William Burroughs), Primitives, Badlands, and True Blood illustrate why Gatewood is considered the world’s premiere chronicler of bizarre human subjects and their extreme behavior.