Scot Sothern

"Scot Sothern Makes this year's most controversial photobook" — The British Journal of Photography on Lowlife in 2011

"Scot Sothern has bravely and empathetically entered a hidden world of humanity. A place where the human condition bares itself on all levels. This penetrating book of photographs and text will haunt and challenge the viewer." — Roger Ballen

Scot Sothern, son of a portrait and wedding photographer in the Missouri Ozarks, spent 40 unsettled years hustling freelance photography in the US and abroad. 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 and as an ebook by powerHouse Books in 2013. The British Journal of Photography called Lowlife "The year's most controversial photobook." Curb Service: A Memoir, was published by Soft Skull Press in July 2013, (https://softskull.com/dd-product/curb-service/) and Streetwalkers was published by powerHouse Books in 2016.(http://www.powerhousebooks.com/books/streetwalkers-2/) Sothern has been in solo and group shows in NYC, Miami, and Los Angeles as well as Ottawa, London, Basel and Paris. In 2013 & 2014 Scot wrote fifty-two photo-illustrated columns for Vice Magazine: Sothern Exposure and Nocturnal Submissions. In 2017 Sothern's novel BigCity was published by Stalking Horse Press. BIGCITY: A NOVEL – StalkingHorsePress

Scot Sothern (born 1949) is an American photographer and writer best known for his controversial black and white photographs of prostitutes in Southern California, whom he photographed from 1986 to 1990, and again in 2010 when he began photograph and writing about sex workers in Los Angeles Skid Row. Sothern says the photographs are exposés, but they don't just expose the women in them, they expose the artist behind the camera. "They show that I am who they are."