Efrain John Gonzalez
Profile
Efrain John Gonzalez is a photographer who’s talents with a camera bend to the unusual, the unique, the wild and slightly crazy, from the world of body modifications, the universe of Noir portraits, transgender beauty, queer politics and protests. Born in the Bronx, raised in Long Island, moved to Manhattan in 1975 to the east village and is now settled in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where he still lives. A photographer since High School, in Holy Trinity High, he has studied Photography at the School of Visual arts.
An internationally published photographer who for the past 40 years has been seeking real life images that tells a story of people finding the path to their souls, finding their bliss, with piercing, branding, cuttings, tattoos, latex, implants, crossdressing, gender queer, leather, and a whole lot of radical politics. He has traveled from coast to coast to find images of people exploring their limits, discovering and living with their own self-defined cultural tribes of beauty, pleasure, joy, and self-realization. People who take the forbidden, and turn it into an empowering statement of their own. People who see their bodies as a blank canvas, and allow their imaginations and dreams to come to life upon a living canvas. These forms of radical play and alternate cultures are not the symptom of some bizarre anti-social behavior, but a natural outreach of the curious and exploration of the self by those chosen few who’s inner voices dare them to walk down forbidden paths to seek an inner truth.
His photographic archive has become a historical record of queer culture, city night life, body modification, and transgender identity