A relentlessly gritty, cheerless portrait of a talented niche artisan.
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.Pub Date: July 16, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59376-520-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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