In amongst the crowds drifting along Hollywood Boulevard there’s an old guy sitting on an orange bucket. He’s wearing dirty jeans and a grey hoodie. The guy’s in his seventies. Weather-worn. Grizzled beard. Walking stick. Back trouble caused by “old spinal injuries and bad decisions.” He looks like another down-and-out panhandling on the street. As people pass he shouts out ‘Look at me.’ When people look, he takes a picture. This is Scot Sothern. He is one of America’s greatest photographers who has spent a lifetime documenting the low-life, low-rent existence of people living on the edge of society. Now he is photographing how people respond to that existence.
As Sothern writes in the introduction to his latest photographic book Look at Me:
Homelessness is omnipresent in America. While there are many talented photographers documenting the homeless with good intention, it has become overexposed, exploitative, and redundant. Street people, desperate and often addicted, don’t want their hard-luck lives recorded. Rather than photograph the homeless I set out to record the public reaction to the people living on the streets.
Sothern takes reaction pictures with a disposable camera. ‘Look at me.’ Some people ignore him. ‘Look at me.’ Some are angry. ‘Look at me.’ Some show compassion. ‘Look at me.’ Some pose like they’re taking a selfie.
It takes guts to sit on a sidewalk shouting like a loon taking photographs. Some people object. Some shout, ‘You can’t take my picture!’ Some threaten to call the cops. Some call him “a peedeeophile” and demand he hand over his camera. Some threaten to kick his ass.
When Sothern started taking street photographs in the 1970s, it was easy. ‘Strangers were happy to be photographed,’ says Sothern. ‘They trusted me even though they didn’t know me or have a clue as to what I was going to do with the photographs.
‘Nowadays no one trusts anyone with a camera, and everyone has a camera. I think maybe too many street photographers today are looking for the most shocking photo they can get; they want to top those, like me, who came before. I think a lot of people feel these new photographers are making fun of them, and I think to some degree they are correct.’
Sothern’s earliest memories are tied to photography. His father ran a photographic studio in Springfield, Missouri. He shot wedding and portrait photographs. Sothern worked in his father’s studio during high school. At fourteen, he started making and selling Little League pictures for his classmates. It was a way of making money.
‘I never thought of photography as having any impact on me or anybody else. I didn’t fall in love with it until I was older and then after discovering I could use it as communication and I could call it art, it became a more important part of my life.’
Sothern has spent his life taking photographs and writing books. It was what he had to do. He is a brilliant photographer and a brilliant writer. His work (from LowLife to Streetwalkers and his novel Big City) explores a world most of us would like to pretend does not exist. A world where nobody really cares about anybody else.
Sitting on the sidewalk of Hollywood Boulevard Sothern yells ‘Look at me!’
All photographs copyright Scot Sothern from his book ‘Look At Me‘, used by kind permission.
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