Kendra Jane Berndt
Managing Editor of Content & Archives
Charles Gatewood, 73, had an indisputable impact on our industry, although he was never a piercer. On Thursday, April 29, 2016 Charles passed away due to complications from a fall on April 8, 2016. According to Betty Gatewood, Charles’s sister, the earlier fall from the third floor balcony of his apartment was a “suicide attempt as he had left several notes behind.”1 No matter the cause of his death, the burden of grief is not eased.
In addition to numerous private collections, Charles Gatewood’s images have been archived in over a dozen libraries and universities across the United States. The Gatewood Archive is currently curated at the Bancroft Library at University of California, Berkeley, which is now the steward of the lion’s share of the Gatewood Archive. Before his death, Charles Gatewood donated his video archive to the Body Piercing Archive. We digitized the first ⅓ of the collection last year, with the remaining ⅔ to be digitally preserved this year.
The Gatewood Archive contains several thousand vintage and modern silver prints, 250,000 slides and negatives, plus contact sheets, proof prints, personal papers, correspondence, over a thousand books, and special collections. The archive also contains three films (including a copy of Dances Sacred and Profane) and a selection of prints by other fine art photographers.2
In our winter issue, we’ll thoroughly explore the incredible impact Charles had on our industry.
“Charles Gatewood, the man known as ‘the anthropologist of the forbidden’, has been documenting America’s sexual underground and alternative subcultures since the 1960s,”
“And though his name may not be that familiar to some younger pervs whose knowledge of fetish history is not that broad, the chances are that even these people will instantly recognize some of his best known images… Gatewood’s work can be traced back to photographs that appeared in the late ’80s ReSearch publication “Modern Primitives,” the seminal work on body modification cults and characters, which introduced the original Modern Primitive, San Francisco’s Fakir Musafar, to a much wider audience.”
“Much of the activity that Gatewood documented on the margins of society in the ’70s, ’80s and early ’90s is now part of contemporary youth culture, today, tattooing is commonplace, and pop stars regularly appear in SM-influenced attire. As sexual and body modification practices once seen as radical and taboo become increasingly accepted by the mainstream consciousness, Gatewood’s photography can be seen as showing the way.”
—Fetish newsletter, TheFetishistas