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.