Photographing a life in prostitution is surely one of the most established clichés of the “concerned” documentary impulse, which treats it like a convenient social archetype and rarely little more, but it’s certainly not all that Scot Sothern’s pictures are. We see real individuals living real lives, they are not trophies or statistics, but so utterly present in these photographs that I can barely look at them – or even be sure that I should look. Too often we fall back on rote theories to explain away what is most troubling about photography, the whole queasy business of looking and being looked at, but these pictures are remarkably specific, without a narrative other than the (naturally incomplete) one of the subjects themselves and their encounter with the photographer, that charged moment of exchange. He is present too and we are complicit in that. Perhaps it is because we can not always be sure of his motives (and indeed, our own) that this work seems so hard to classify.
Sothern’s approach is a long way from the calculated surfaces that we have come to expect, the ghettos of conceptual justification and slick lifestyle imagery. In fact, there is something about his work that suggests a relationship (however unlikely it might seem at first) to August Sander’s elegiac portraits from the Weimar years, refusing to be anything other than what they are and so he photographs them as such. These are the inverse of the grand systems to which Sander (and his age) aspired, the frayed remnants of that ideal – and a life that people survive daily, even though we don’t like to be reminded of it. But Sothern can’t pretend he’s trying to change anything either, that would be deeper than photography can reach, predicated on a world order, so he just gathers in its effects, taking account of unremembered lives. Again, like Sander, pushing that lack of inflection to the limits (as if these are “just” photographs about the encounter itself) conceals an obsessively pursued set of intentions, both concerned with otherness and how it is negotiated.
Yet the fact remains that his reasons for making these pictures and our reaction to them are complex, perhaps even suspect. I can’t say I’m not uncomfortable looking at them. I don’t think I’m alone in being disturbed by what these photographs say about our society (even those parts of it I can hardly imagine) and also the medium itself, its subtle evasions. But then again, why shouldn’t the photographer be implicated in what he photographs? At least Sothern doesn’t hide behind “ethics” or a reformist agenda and so won’t allow us those useless luxuries. There is no story, nothing to be resolved, but the intensity of this work and the dilemma it presents are necessities, if troubling ones. To be honest I’m still not sure if Sothern was “right” in how (or why) he made these photographs. But he did and I’m willing to consider them on their own terms, even if I’m not entirely sure what those are.
Sothern's site is here, an American Suburb X post on his work can be found here.
