Scot Sothern reflects on a lifetime behind the lens in America's underbelly
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Tracing a dude like Scot Sothern‘s personal history can be a little challenging. At first glance, the most prominent points on the timeline seem oddly scattered–thematically, geographically, and temporally, across a good five or six decades. Sifting through his greatest hits, you’ll find cults in middle America and disappearing tribes in the Middle East. His series of vintage photo essays on Vice finds him draft dodging during ‘Nam in Kansas City, tripping in the San Gabriel Valley with blood-drinking Satanists, and drunkenly wandering the streets of 1980s Cairo. There are too many stories to count, and very few don’t involve either sex or substances. When I asked Scot to piece it all together for me, it felt almost like a gonzo Forrest Gump–if Forrest Gump had been really into taking pictures of hookers.
Sothern spent a solid block of time in the ’80s exploring the seedy underbelly of Southern California, meeting and photographing the sex workers who called it home. Scot’s work from that era was collected and published in 2011’s Lowlife, and through the Vice ecosystem, found the audience it always deserved; the book, along with a handful of solo exhibitions, reprsented a high water mark for exposure in Sothern’s career. But to look at his journey through the prism of any one project is more than a little reductive. A half century spent as a freelance shooter and hedonist have left Sothern with a body of work that’s expansive, fearless and occasionally brutal in its honesty. To put it mildly, he’s seen some things.
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Ostensibly, Sothern’s early life and career were defined by a few things: rebelliousness, uncertainty, occasional poverty, debauchery. So, when I get him on the phone, I’m struck by just how settled he sounds. He’s congenial and witty, more than happy to take a minute to walk me through his life’s stranger chapters. Sothern is 64 now, 20 years into his second marriage. He’s still a night owl, but a few surgeries in the ’90s have left him less mobile than he used to be. These days, he spends more time organizing vintage imagery into stories for his Vice column, Sothern Exposure, than he does shooting new ones. But get him talking about the right subject, and you can hear his fiery side flare up. He’s prone to the occasional Berkeley dad political rant, but far from self-serious.
“I don’t know that I was compelled to move around so much as I just happened to move around,” he tells me. Scot was born and raised in Springfield, Missouri, and came of age just as the square ’50s gave way to the radical ’60s. Dad made a living as a photographer for yearbooks and family portraits, and Scot hung around in the darkroom starting before he could even reach the trays. But, having already developed a distaste for authority and a penchant for experimentation, Scot wasn’t exactly keen on picking up the family business, or as he put it, “making goofy faces at kids” for a living. “I grew up with this big ‘fuck you’ thing,” he tells me, “I think it’s helpful. I think it’s a good thing.”
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Still, when Scot and a girlfriend packed up and relocated to Tallahassee, Florida in the early ’70s, his only real skills were behind a camera. He found a steady stream of business shooting portraits, and soon after, found himself with an opportunity. When a successful local photographer died, Scot and a buddy holed up in his abandoned studio for the next two years, somehow scamming the landlord into believing the space and the gear was theirs. With free range over a legitimate studio, Scot’s work shifted from commercial to personal, and instead of families, Scot started taking in strangers off the street to shoot. Sothern had started to find what would end up becoming his calling card: gritty, uncompromising portraits of real people. “My father had taught me that a portrait was supposed to be a flattering image of a person,” he tells me, “I found out that it wasn’t a flattering image that I wanted, what I wanted was to pull something out that person…reveal something about them.” But following the passion project wasn’t exactly lucrative. “Once I figured that out, that’s when I stopped being able to make money,” he laughs, “people don’t usually wanna pay you for portraits that make them look like assholes.”
The next decade of Scot’s life was split between gonzo, experiential journalism and a pair of failed marriages, with plenty of moving around in between. The aftermath of the second one left him in a tailspin, and in the midst of a particularly gnarly bender, he found himself out looking for a hooker in the streets of L.A. When he found one, he felt a sudden compulsion to document the experience: “If I’m gonna do something like pick up a prostitute, and I’m a photographer, why wouldn’t I?”
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Over the next few years, Scot began building an anthology of prostitute portraits, lurking the streets of L.A. and then later, New York, in the wee hours of the night. To get by, he took night jobs or side photo gigs: “It was great. I could do my work, and then walk out the door into this enormously sleazy, wild atmosphere at 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning. And I really loved that.”
Sometimes as john, sometimes as documentarian, Sothern became hooked on the idea of channeling private encounters with sex workers into a storytelling exercise. Though the project was never meant as an expose, Sothern’s portraits represent an idiosyncratic document of late ’80s desperation, soaked in some of the residual sadness of the era’s twin epidemics. But it’s not all tragedy either. The best of those black and whites are soulful, playful. They’re pictures of people. Some are clothed, some are nude; some of the girls ham it up and some seem vaguely confused by the notion that someone would want to take their picture. Occasionally, there are masks or veils to obscure identity. If occasionally, they feel exploitative, all of them radiate personality.
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Scot tends to stress the political dimensions of his work. We talked about the stigma around prostitution, and how he’d rather not just be remembered as “the guy who photographed whores.” While he’s never considered himself a photojournalist in any formal sense, he talks about how we hopes his work is a catalyst for compassion, rather than just controversy. “People don’t see what’s right in front of them,” he says, “and that’s what the prostitute pictures have always been about–trying to force people to look at the world they don’t see around them.” For obvious reasons though, the Lowlife pictures have been a double-edged sword. “When people hear that I photograph prostitutes, their first reaction is that I’m a sleazebag and a misogynist,” he tells me, “And that’s just not true.”
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A few weeks removed from New York Mag’s Terry Richardson cover story (and a slew of mostly boring thinkpieces) it’s worth considering the media landscape that gave Sothern’s work its biggest platform to date. At the center of that sea change is the Vice empire, who have championed Scot’s work alongside more recent nudie luminaries like Richardson, Dash Snow, Richard Kern, and Ryan McGinley. To lump all those folks together, or especially to lump Sothern’s work in with Terry, doesn’t quite make sense though. In comparison to Terryworld, Sothern’s work is less cartoony, less stylized, and a hell of a lot less exploitative. In the pages of Lowlife or his memoir, Curb Service, you’ll find unflinching, powerful portraits of women in all shapes and sizes, rather than say, models with their jizz in their eyes.
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But still, Sothern was Vice before Vice existed–a gonzo documentarian wandering from one dicey to the next, and living to tell the tale. You could imagine a younger version of him becoming a cult superstar in the sensational internet age, live tweeting Satanist rituals and mescaline trips. He estimates 90% of his fans are under 40 (a good chunk of them in the coveted demographic that will make Shane Smith a billionaire in the next year or so). I ask him why he thinks that is. “Well I hope it’s not for the reasons it probably is,” he says, “When you’re young, you’re so full of rebellion, you’re so full of ‘fuck you’, but people don’t always stay that way. Sometimes it’s just an attitude. If they did stay that way, I would have a lot more fans my own age.”
“If you’re 25 years old, you might look at me and say, ‘man look at this guy, he made it all the way to his 60s and did exactly what he wanted to do, and never took any shit from anybody,'” he says, with skepticism. It dawns on me that I’m 25, that I read Vice, and that in part, it was the sensational aspects of Sothern’s work that made we want to track him down. I come up against my own romanticism more than a few times in the interview, like when Scot tells me that honestly, he just wishes he could’ve made more money: “I always sort of wished I could just a be a guy who goes to work, and makes a living, and comes home and watches TV…and now I’m kinda at that stage.”
It’s not that Sothern’s not proud of the incendiary qualities in his work, but I could hear a certain sadness in his voice when he talked about certain things–about money, or the way his generation abandoned its ’60s idealism, or about being pigeonholed as a smut peddler, having some folks judge his life’s work by shock value. Thinking back to the “edgier” way I wanted to frame the article originally, I couldn’t help but feel a little naive, and maybe a little opportunistic. And I’m still not sure if I’m telling the story right.
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Occasionally, Scot still takes a late night drive down to Skid Row, and slips a girl a $20 to take her picture. He still has a few running projects going, and still creates images that are dark and provocative and profound. For the most part though, he’s at home, sharing a life spent on the move through a different medium. “I counted the other day. I’ve done 36 stories for Vice,” he says. “And every week I’m facing a deadline, I’m freaking out thinking, my god, I’m gonna run out of stories…but I haven’t yet.”
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Scot Sothern’s life and times are documented in the 2013 memoir Curb Service, published by Soft Skull Press. You can keep up with his latest stories via his recurring Vice column, Sothern Exposure.
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