drkrm/gallery is excited to present Lowlife, a photographic
journey though the motels and back alleys of street prostitution.
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.
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.
These timeless portraits reveal the never changing plight of the
street prostitute.
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.
On display concurrently in the Project Room: One Night at the
Ivar photographs by Ryan Herz. |