You Know What

Scot Sothern is a Los Angeles–based photographer and a big prostitute fan. He has been interacting with and photographing hookers since the 1960s, and his images have been widely exhibited in galleries in the US, Canada, and Europe. Scot's pictures evoke such a visceral reaction in the viewer and raise so many questions, we decided to give Scot a regular column aimed at getting the story behind the photo. The idea is simple: we feature an image from Scot’s archive along with his explanation of just exactly what the fuck was going on when he took it. Welcome to Nocturnal Submissions.

Van Nuys Boulevard, in the San Fernando Valley, feels like a terrarium under a restaurant heat lamp. The sun is aimed low and the dust-flocked windshield is a haze of refracted light I squint behind dark glasses and drive slowly. Body shops and fast food dumps, factories and gas stations, schizophrenics and housewives.

A girl in black stretchy pants and a translucent undershirt holds her thumb in the air. She’s a curly headed blonde, sinewy and angular. I pull to the curb and buzz down the window. She bends at the waist, hands on her knees, and checks me out cautiously, like she’s peering into a lion’s den.

I give her a friendly smile. “Hey. How’s it going? You wanna go for a ride?”

“I think so. OK, I guess.”

“Have you got a place to go?”

“Not really.”

“There’s a motel just up the street, I can get us a room for an hour.”

“An hour, that’s a lot of time just to do you know what. If that’s what you want, you gotta pay for a whole hour.”

I tell her what I want is pictures and we settle on $30 cash for five poses and $20 more if I require you know what at the end of the photo shoot. She gets in the car and I ask her what’s her name, where’s she from? She tells me Patty, from Mitchell, South Dakota. I say oh yeah, I’ve been there. Went to the Corn Palace. She says yeah, the Corn Palace, and have I accepted Jesus Christ as my savior? I tell her no but if she has it’s fine with me.

“If you let Jesus into your heart you’ll never be unhappy again.”

“Thanks anyway but I think it’s the unhappy part of me that keeps me going forward.”

“Everybody wants to be happy.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t know.”

The motel room is just a motel room. Patty tells me she needs to say a prayer first and do I want to take off my pants. I admit that I might be more comfortable without my pants and go ahead, praise the lord. She puts her palms together, like a church steeple, and talks to God in whispers. She says amen then pulls her shirt over her head and kicks off her sandals. I get naked except for my Nikon and Vivitar flash; I do my best work unencumbered. She asks me have I ever heard the story of Mary Magdalene and I say I don’t know, maybe, was she the harlot?

“Jesus loved the whores as he loved the little children, and Mary kissed his feet.”

“Yeah, well, stand over here by the window. Yeah, that’s good. Now look at me. You look great. You’re really pretty.” I make two exposures.

“I’m not really pretty. I’m really plain and I know it, but God sees my inner beauty. That’s why I pass around his word.”

“I can see your inner beauty as well. How about if you get up on the bed?”

“You don’t think it’s serious, you’re just making fun of me. You think you’re too smart for Christianity but I forgive you anyway.”

“You can forgive me all you want, just don’t try to salvage me. Maybe we could talk about something else. Lick your lips and look up here.” The shutter curtain goes flip-flop, flip-flop.

On the bed, on her knees and elbows, Patty frames her face with her fingers. “You’re pickle is all hard. You still want to take pictures or do you want to go ahead and do what you want to do to me?”

“A couple more pictures, scoot back to the headboard and maybe we can lose the pants.”

She scoots back and peels off her pants, outers and unders. She looks at me and starts to rub herself and I’m hoping she’s not going to start singing “Jesus Loves Me.” I aim and focus and see a two-inch Tampax string hanging from her vagina. The first time I took nude pictures of a girl I was 20 and she had three little pellets of toilet paper stuck to her pudenda and I was somehow too mortified to tell her; I took the pictures knowing there would be some time-consuming retouching in the future. That’s how I feel now, looking at the string hanging from Patty, like a dorky kid who can’t talk to girls about you know what. She keeps rubbing and I can’t tell if she’s having a good time or not, though probably not. I go solo with spit and both hands. It takes a while and when it comes I sprinkle the bedspread. Patty thanks the lord and puts her clothes back on.

Previously - Too Many Motherfuckin' Ugly People

Scot's first book, Lowlife, was released last year and his memoir, Curb Service, is out now. You can find more information on his website.