Paperback – Scot Sothern, 2011
- Publisher : Stanley Barker (January 1, 2011)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 96 pages
- Measures: 8.75 x 7.5 inches
SOLD.
Asking $50 Signed & dedicated by the photographer in 2012.
Published in the U.K. as a limited edition artist’s book in 2011, and now out of print.
Scot Sothern spent 40 unsettled years hustling freelance photography. His first solo exhibit, LOWLIFE, was held at the Drkrm Gallery in Los Angeles in 2010. His first book, LOWLIFE, was published in the U.K. by Stanley Barker in 2011. Scot has since been in solo and group shows on both coasts of the U.S. as well as in Ottawa, London, and Basel. The British Journal of Photography called LOWLIFE, “The year’s most controversial photobook.” Scot writes a twice monthly column, with photographs, “Nocturnal Submissions,” for Vice. His forthcoming book, Curb Service: A Memoir, will be published by Soft Skull Press in July 2013. Sothern maintains a blog, www.scotsothern.com.
Using his camera like a knuckled fist, Scot Sothern spent five years photographing street prostitutes and the bleak netherworld they, and he, inhabited. He was not in the trenches as a journalist or crusader but as a John with base instincts and an artistic eye. Gritty, black-and-white Tri-X images, along with Sothern’s short, confessional writing tell the story of An American Lowlife. Shot mostly in Southern California between 1986 and 1990, this work records the existence of the many disenfranchised Americans, men and women, hawking body and soul for the price of a Big Mac and a fix. With these full-frontal portraits, and full disclosure texts, An American Lowlife documents the struggle and paralyzing plight of street-level sex workers-victims of a culture that deems them criminal and expendable.
“When I pulled off the freeway into San Diego, I had a single twenty dollar bill in my wallet. My car, a 1973 Toyota station wagon, rattled my teeth and died in idle. At stops I had to divide my right foot: heel on the brake, toes revving the accelerator. I had barely enough gas to get back to Los Angeles.
On El Cajon Boulevard I drove slowly and studied the street walkers. In their eyes I could see desperation-induced madness, premature death. In my eyes they could see my craving for the nasty little secret I kept from friends and family. I could give my twenty dollars to any one of these women. I could buy a quick sex fix and she could buy enough crack to put a smile on her face for an hour or so.
In the passenger seat, belted and buckled, frail and beautiful, my four-year-old son, Dashiell, slept curled around his best friend, a pillow-sized stuffed facsimile of Hulk Hogan. It was Sunday night and my weekend with my little boy was over.
When we arrived at his mother’s house, Dash awoke. He cried and clung tightly, arms around my neck. He didn’t want me to go. His mother Sylvia, my ex-wife, was happy to see me go, but first she wanted money. I made lame excuses. She called me a jerk and pried our son from my embrace. I took my twenty dollars and drove back to El Cajon Boulevard.”
– From the Introduction of Low Life, Scot Sothern, 1986
Scot Sothern
Writer/photographer Scot Sothern bounced from job to job for 40 years. His first solo exhibit, LOWLIFE, was held at the notorious Drkrm Gallery in Los Angeles in 2010. His first book, LOWLIFE, was published in the U.K. by Stanley Barker in 2011. The British Journal of Photography called LOWLIFE, “The years’ most controversial photobook.” Scot’s work has since been exhibited in galleries in Los Angeles, New York, Miami, London, and Paris. In 2013 Scot took a two-year stint writing biweekly columns, Nocturnal Submissions and Sothern Exposure, for VICE Magazine. In 2013, Curb Service: A Memoir, was published by Soft Skull Press. STREETWALKERS, stories and photographs was published by powerHouse Books in February 2016. Writer, Jerry Stahl, called it “An absolutely amazing and essential book.”
BIG CITY is Sothern’s first novel.
“Deliciously strange and compelling, delightfully lurid and fun, Scot Sothern’s debut novel reads like a feral mashup of Cormac McCarthy and William Gibson amped on cornjuice and spiderbite.” –Mark Haskell Smith
“In the latest work of art-prose from the incomparable Stalking Horse Press, Scot Sothern shows that he’s not just a linguistic power-hitter, but a dynamic storyteller, too. There’s enough imagination on every page of BigCity for an entire novel.” D. Harlan Wilson, author of Battles without Honor or Humanity and Peckinpah: An Ultraviolent Romance
“The job of the novelist is to conjure a whole world, and Scot Sothern has done that in spades here. Lush, large-hearted, antic, and fiercely feminist, BigCity is unlike anything else I’ve ever read.” Ron Currie, author of Every Thing Matters, The One-Eyed Man
“An explosion of language and characters, a fast-and-loose yet potent and authentic way with our American history, rude and gross and gorgeous and hilarious and heart-rending — “Big City” is everything you want in a novel, bold and challenging and surprising. I love it!”
– Julie Powell, author of Julie & Julia.
PRESS:
https://loeildelaphotographie.com/en/scot-sothern-then-and-now/
https://powerhousebooks.com/newsletters/130626/
https://mirroredsociety.com/interview/scot-sothern-street-walkers-sad-city
https://medium.com/@blackballoonpub/follow-your-hard-on-an-interview-with-scot-sothern-nsfw-1b4b36c89aa6
https://www.scotsothern.com/p/exhibits.html
