Scot Sothern spent forty unsettled years hustling freelance photography. Scot worked in department stores, churches, bowling alleys, sports events, and high school proms. He worked in a cave at a tourist-trap in Missouri, making and selling photo mementos. Traveling with a portable studio, he made and sold children's portraits and noveltiesphoto buttons and key-chain viewers. Scot shot model's portfolios, head-shots, and nude magazine layouts. He spent three years in Tallahassee, Florida, with a photography studio, three seasons with a high school yearbook studio in Los Angeles, and has been employed in three different cities as a darkroom technician. Forced into commercial retirement by the crippling byproduct of a motorcycle mishap, Scot now writes books and has continued making photographs.
"Praise for Curb Service ""Sothern 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... A relentlessly gritty, cheerless portrait of a talented niche artisan."" --Kirkus ""Scot Sothern is the real thing. This is damn good writing."" --Dan Fante ""Armed with a camera and a gift for words, Scot Sothern crept into the darker corners of life and subjected himself to what J.M. Barrie called 'a long lesson in humility.' The result is a masterful memoir, full of truth-telling, ugliness, beauty, tragedy, and humor. Curb Service is brave, funny, and heartwarming in ways you can't see coming."" --Bill Fitzhugh, author of Pest Control Praise for Lowlife ""Scot Sothern has taken his camera into a world that only a microscopic fraction of the human population knows exists. Sothern is not a mere voyeur, he wades deeply into zones most never will and renders his subjects with dignity and compassion. Lowlife is a moving and compelling piece of work."" --Henry Rollins ""Lowlife is brutal stuff. A vicious slice of the American pie. A camera lucida of la bas, as the French say. It doesn't get much further down and straight to the being than this. A cautionary series of tales that's seguro."" --Barry Gifford"