KIRKUS REVIEW
CURB SERVICE A Memoir
Author: Scot Sothern
Review Issue Date: June 15, 2013
Online Publish Date: June 9, 2013
Publisher:Soft Skull Press
Pages: 288
Price ( Paperback ): $18.95
Publication Date: July 16, 2013
ISBN ( Paperback ): 978-1-59376-520-0
Category: Nonfiction
A cult photographer’s raw, rugged life in words and images.
Sothern, notorious for his colorless, voyeuristic and often brutal
images of Los Angeles prostitutes and the homeless, reveals the stories
behind his photographs and offers a glimpse into a life of hardships and
addictions that thoroughly challenged him. His prone portraitures are
the result of years spent propositioning all manner of ladies of the
evening, from a Mexican prostitute to a preop transvestite who resembled
"Pocahontas," with "boy parts hanging around, waiting for the
guillotine." The book’s sections, decorated with snapshots from the
author’s distinctive photographic oeuvre, skitter from the 1990s
back to the ’80s to find Sothern establishing himself as both a
commercial photographer and a budding "artist," while an affinity for
ephemeral dalliances with prostitutes and escorts were the true
formative experiences that molded his dark alter ego. Brief sketches of
his father, a former pro photographer embarking on a fourth marriage,
are braided into a whirlwind of booze, dope, blackouts and countless
trysts spent photographing the desperate girls whose images front each
chapter. Sothern’s grim narrative is hardly a sunny affair; it volleys
among chronicles of short, custodial weekends with his son, bouts of
acrimonious sparring with his ex-wife, Sylvia, the downtrodden women he
captures with his lens, hospitalized illnesses and debt collectors. He
daringly invites readers to sit bedside while he spends dingy afternoons
in dusty motel rooms with streetwalkers, crack pipes, empty promises
and his trusty camera, recording flashes of desperate women addled by
drug abuse and hopelessness. Only in the memoir’s final pages does
Sothern begin to reap long-overdue recognition for his "tastefully
dirty" body of work.
A relentlessly gritty, cheerless portrait of a talented niche artisan.
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