Amazon.com Book Description (ISBN 3980587649, Paperback)

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.