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Lowlife Opening
Reception and Book Signing "Scot
Sothern has taken his camera into a world that only a microscopic
fraction of the human population knows exists. Sothern is not
a mere voyeur, he wades deeply into zones most never will and
renders his subjects with dignity and compassion. Lowlife is a
moving and compelling piece of work." --Henry Rollins
"Lowlife
is brutal stuff. A vicious slice of the American pie. A camera
lucida of la bas, as the French say. It doesn't get much further
down and straight to the being than this. A cautionary series
of tales that's seguro." --Barry Gifford drkrm presents Lowlife, a gritty, black and white photographic journey though the motels and back alleys of street prostitution. Lowlife will be on display November 5th through December 3rd with an opening reception and a book signing Saturday November 5th starting at 7pm. During the exhibit a limited edition and a deluxe version of the book Lowlife: Photographs by Scot Sothern, published in the UK by Stanley Barker, will be available. Photographer Scot Sothern first patronized the marketplace of curbside prostitution on a prurient whim. He dove to the murky depths of sexual obsession, and five years later resurfaced-- shell shocked and without excuse. While there, trusty Nikon in hand, Sothern snapped what he saw: full-frontal X-rated realities, fine-art documents, black and white, pathos and pizzazz. A mix of yins and yangs, prurient and sad, funny and gut-wrenching. Lowlife is an illustrated memoir of dysfunction, a confession of a befuddled white guy maintaining a precarious connection to propriety and fatherhood while side-tripping into noirish infatuations. Sothern's images, shot mostly in Southern California between 1986 and 1990, record the existence of these disenfranchised Americans, men and women, hawking souls for the price of a Big Mac and a fix, struggling in a culture that deems them criminal and expendable. As Sothern opines, "Anyone could offer them 10 bucks to take a brick in the face and they’d hold out their palm." These timeless portraits reveal the never changing plight of the street prostitute. This exhibition contains graphic nudity and explicit content. A second generation photographer, Scot Sothern was behind a camera and in the darkroom from an early age. In the 1960s, rebellious and angry, he learned to use photography as a weapon while hiding behind the viewfinder. The photography on display throughout Lowlife is at times explicit, The images bring to mind the works of early twentieth-century photographer E.J. Bellocq, as well as contemporary photographers Nan Golden and Diane Arbus.
Links to Interviews and Articles: Gomma
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