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Richard Kern

If there were an affirmative action program within the art-world to admit the best representative of every kind of artistic practice, then Richard Kern would be the designated dirty old man. While there have always been, and undoubtedly always will be, lascivious older men using "art" as a lure for lovely young girls, Kern is one of the few to have garnered wide audiences in art, fashion and pornography by building a decades-long career photographing an endless array of cuties in compromising positions. His snap-shot style shots of accessibly pretty girls, in and out of their panties, can be seen everywhere from Hustler, Barely Legal and Vice to Purple, Paper and other high-end fashion magazines.

Pulp has sung "if fashion is your trade/ then when you're naked you must be unemployed." But Kern, along with Terry Richardson and Larry Clark, has managed to make taking pictures of the pretty girls populating Brooklyn and downtown Manhattan into an art form which has influenced all facets of fashion photography and earned him his place as a legitimate New York art icon.

Before gaining notoriety as a portrait photographer, Kern pioneered the grainy, short, underground narrative art/punk at the center of the 1980's downtown New York Cinema of Transgression movement. Though Kern has since shot videos for bands such as Sonic Youth and Marilyn Manson, and photographed celebrities such as Nick Nolte, Eva Green, Claudia Schiffer and Asia Argento, most of his output, including nine monographs of images, consists of signature shots of next-door neighbor- looking girls puttering naked around his New York apartment.

Kern, who was born in North Carolina in 1954 and received his BFA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, moved to New York City in 1979. When he was a child, he would accompany his father, the editor of the local newspaper, on assignment to photograph the events the paper reported. Once in New York, Kern joined the downtown art scene by employing his fellow artists in quick raw films which his website summarizes as: "the characters in my films shot up drugs, pierced or cut themselves, beat each other up, sucked each other off, killed their parents, raped youngsters, etc. over harsh soundtracks produced by my friend Jim Thirlwell." The films were often screened at acid parties and as the opening act to bands, before going on the road throughout the United States and abroad where they were regularly
booed or banned.

But Kern's films admirably suited his scene and surroundings. He has lived in the same minimally decorated apartment up five flights of stairs in a still-slightly-sketchy 3rd Street location between New York City's Avenues C and D since 1988. At that time, New York parents were still teaching their children that the Alphabet for that area of downtown Manhattan ran - "A is Alright, B is Bad, C is Crazy and go on Avenue D and you're Dead". Now, even after the city's all-over make-over during the 90s, Avenues C and D are still raw and the area's ungentrified scrappy sexuality still oozes from Kern's work.

Kern's images have a permanent grimy cool quality that appeals to every new generation of hipster art student - a demographic that describes most of his models. The girls who pose for him most often look like exemplars of the hot, slightly neurotic, self-obsessed gamines who come to New York hoping to find a place in a downtown scene like the one Kern helped create. From a knowing viewer's perspective, however, the girls are recognizable as the elusive little creatures selling cupcakes in Lower East Side bakeries, serving organic soup in Williamsburg or answering phones at some storefront gallery space in Outer Brooklyn.

Voyeurism is his aesthetic's theme and his images are compelling in part because they contain an unnerving element of on-looker's self-consciousness. The tampon string dangling between a girl's legs, the toothpaste dribbling out of another girl's mouth or the black eye a third girl nurses with raw meat are the dirty residue of Kern's punk roots.

The consistent context for Kern's images is the meta-narrative of a man photographing an unprofessional model who is probably posing for the first time. Whether answering Kern's ad was the right decision for these naïve-seeming kids is a question that haunts his photographs and raises the ante of their eroticism. Many of the portraits look as though they are being taken while the models insecurely prep themselves minutes before loosing their virginity under seedy, unmemorable circumstances.

For these reasons, many critics have been quick to denounce Kern's portraits as exploitative. But these critiques of Kern's work condescend to his models. Curiously, critics and reporters rarely mention that Kern is attractive himself. He has the grey-fox good looks popularized in seventies male fashion magazines like Esquire and GQ, and his physical appearance is hardly irrelevant to the work he produces. Like Courbet's dreamy, erotic portraits of lover and muse, Serge Gainsbourg's photographs of Jane Birkin for Oui magazine or Mario Sorrenti's iconic shots of Kate Moss when they were a couple, part of the appeal of Kern's shots is an undercurrent of mutual sexual tension between him and his models which is only barely mitigated by the camera. Thus, when looking through his lens, we feel that we're interrupting something. Kern might be positioning himself as a voyeur, but we feel almost a little ashamed to be situated between him and his models. The urge is to shy away, telling them to not mind us, just carry on.

Richard Kern: Action, a new monograph of Kern's portraits, will be out from Taschen this month.

ANA FINEL HONIGMAN: How do you categorize your work?

RICHARD KERN: I try not to categorize my work as anything other than portraits. I find though that often my work needs to be categorized, or different aspects of my work need to be defined, depending on what the work is being used for.

AFH: When you said 'portraits' are you thinking along the lines of soft-core pin-up portraits?

RK: No, never. I would never categorize my work as that. There are things I shot for pornographic magazines, and those images are porn. But then there is stuff I shoot for myself, and those are images I would not describe as pornographic or pin-ups. Those are images I think of as portraits. The images shoot just for myself are very specific. They usually involve a naked woman in some way, though lately it hasn't, but usually those images involve some component of things you would see in photographs where people have no clothes on. It is not always that. I've been trying for ages to find some reason, other that that you're just looking at a photo of someone naked standing there.

AFH: How do you personally define pornography? Is it only about the use the images are put to?

RK: That's the only definition I can come up with. It is hard to define but if it is produced for a place specifically intended for images men masturbate to, then it is generally pornography. At least, I am talking about images of naked women that are used in those contexts. I am not talking about the other kinds of pornography that exist in the world.

AFH: Lately a lot of artists are appropriating pornographic images or the aesthetics of porn in attempts to critically engage with the sociological, cultural or political issues ascribed to porn. Are you interested in that trend in contemporary art?

RK: Nudity in art has a rich, long, tradition. John Currin is a traditionalist. I don't see the pornographic references as boring. That's not boring. Recently someone commissioned artists to do a DVD of porn. Big artists like Richard Prince, Matthew Barney and Larry Clark did pornography. I don't remember who commissioned this thing, but I keep getting asked about it. It was someone's project to commission artists to do porn and that is just boring to me.

AFH: Do you view that work as nothing more than pompous pornography?

RK: I don't understand why artists have to comment on pornography. 'Pompous' might be the right word, but 'predictable' works too. I don't understand why the idea wasn't 'lets get together the best people who make real pornography and have them make a super-porno.' Instead, they have a bunch of artists commenting on porn, though they don't even comment on porn. It seems like they are just making porn to make porn. I cant make a broad statement, but that DVD just didn't do it for me.

AFH: But the interesting and alluring thing about some artists' work is that they straddle the divide between critical commentary and work that is purely arousing.

RK: Larry Clark's contribution to that project was the most interesting because he used real people. He didn't make anything arty. He asked some eighteen year-old kids who they wanted to have sex with and then video-taped them.

AFH: That sounds fun to have Larry Clark play Cupid.

RK: Sure.

AFH: You've been producing work through various significant cultural shifts in the ways people, inside the art community and in the general culture, view pornography. Have cultural pressures or support influenced the ways you work or interpret what you do?

RK: What do you mean?

AFH: It must be very different exhibiting your work during the 80s and 90s when feminist interpretations of art heavily influenced the way sexuality explicit work was viewed versus now.

RK: None of that stuff had any effect on what I was doing. I was working in a vacuum, assuming everything I was doing was okay. And then I was surprised at people's reactions. I had a show at the ICA in 2001 and I thought it was a nice rounded show. There were dicks and lots of naked women, with a few funny shots in there. I thought it was just some photographs of mine. But the response was as if it was a sex show. Sarah Kent, from Time Out, just hated it. I was shocked by her response. To me, they just looked like regular photographs. I'm so used to it all. But I can see her walking in, seeing all these naked women, and just thinking "Oh my God! This is outrageous. My panties are fuckin' riding right up my asscrack." I can see a lot of people having that response now. That response has effected me and that has happened a lot through out my career.

AFH: What were other particularly striking instances of opposition to your work?

RK: I made a film called "fingered." In the early '90s, I used to tour around with my films. I would often tour Germany, and quite often the films would be banned before I even got there. "Fingered" was banned before I even got there, just from hearsay.

AFH: In Germany? Really? Those people are always nude. I've been on nude beaches in Germany, where geriatrics had genital piercings and waxed testicles.

RK: Well in the late eighties and early nineties, they were banning my movies. They thought my film was glorifying rape.

AFH: Oh, that's not nice.

RK: Maybe, but they hadn't seen it. There were shut downs and all the screenings. And the funny thing was that at a few, they were all male feminists. They were men who were claiming to be feminists. That confused me.

AFH: That enrages me, but that's another issue.

RK: It was just something that stood out in my mind. Lately, I've been trying to have a reason for showing what I show. My last few shows were about specific aspects of pornography, or voyeurism or stuff like that. I want to find a context.

AFH: Are you saying that these responses have made you feel you need to wrap or cushion your work in some sort of conceptual packaging?

RK: If you're supposed to be doing 'art,' then you're supposed to have some conceptual basis anyway.

AFH: Who says?

RK: I went to school in the 70s, it was conceptual art time, and that was what we were taught then. My training was that, you have an idea that you're working towards and that idea has meaning. There was a Bruce Nauman piece I saw when I was 20 years old, that always stuck in my head. It said "the artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths." It was a joke but it is actually inspiring to me. There has to be something more that just naked girls. There can be a range of things I show at once, and that's how I'm doing it now. I'm showing series.

AFH: Sure, but why is it the artist's responsibility to determine and display the meaning of the work. Why isn't it the critic's responsibility?

RK: Well, that's what my art history professors always said. They always told us artists that we nothing without them. They gave us meaning. We were nothing but empty vessels. Just as there was the conceptual art movement, there was the conceptual critics movement where critics determined and declared that they were the ones making art important. As a critic, I bet you agree with that. Don't you?

AFH: Me? No, no, no. I like you artists. What troubles me is how often this notion that art has to be conceptual corrupts artists' practice. A lot of artists are producing illustrations of theories or using undigested ideas they regurgitate in order to explain, and I imagine they hope to excuse, their boring, uninspired, work.

RK: Oh yes. Are you talking about me?

AFH: (laughing) No! Oh, no. No. Not all.

RK: Oh, good. Well, for me, for my own mental state, I just think that because there are so many photographs out there that I am trying to make, what I show, and not what I do, needs some cohesiveness. Wolfgang Tillmans does not just stick some photos on a wall, he is very specific about what he sticks and where he sticks it.

AFH: Sure, but themes can often be very loose and very open. Justine Kurland's gorgeous show which just opened at Michelle Innes & Nash, consists of nude hippie mothers with their children in nature. It's a clear series with an obvious theme but what she intends for it to mean remains open to viewer interpretation.

RK: I agree, but then there are so many fucking photographs out there that there needs to be something limiting it all. I photograph all kinds of things and not just naked girls. It is getting increasingly difficult to find reasons to shoot the naked girls. It is fun and I am not going to deny that but I need to find more reasons for why to shoot them. It would be more fun of they would just come over and I could just sit there. To actually come up with stuff to do is hard.

AFH: You mean that there are too many photographic images in culture generally or that there are too many art photographs in the market?

RK: Well, for my last show at Hotel, in London, there were seven images and I only produced one of each image.

AFH: For each image that you show, how many do you shoot?

RK: For that show, I must have shot thousands. It took me about a year to shoot for that show.

AFH: What was the conceptual theme to that show?

RK: The theme was - girls and their panties, and the panties were framed with the photograph. That was it.

AFH: Now, there is an awesome theme. Was that inspired by the Japanese school-girl panty vending machine?

RK: The idea there was that I wanted to make a comment about collectors and the strangeness of people collecting stuff. I then thought that it would be really great to have my collectors collecting panties. I though - wouldn't it be funny to have people collecting girls' panties.

AFH: Just to be clear, you were offering the actual panties the girls had worn in the shoot with photographs of the girls in their panties?

RK: Yes. That is why I wanted to just have one print per image, instead of series. Though in Japan, you can buy the same panties over and over again. And the images had to be right. I wanted the images to be ones were you actually really see the panties. I wanted viewers to think, "I want to touch those panties." They are hiding everything and they have to be something you want to touch. The photographs needed to elicit desire. That is an incredible hard image to take. It is incredibly hard to take a photo and have the girl work and the image work and it all come together.

AFH: So these are real portraits because you are including both the image of the girls and their actual DNA sealed in the panties.

RK: Yes, that is nice.

AFH: It's interesting now all this cum art will age isn't it? Duchamp's cum stain on astralon "painting" Paysage Fautif has turned yellow. In one hundred years, imagine how interesting it will be to have images of cute, young, girls framed alongside panties with rotten, yellow, secretions.

RK: Duchamp is great. I used to live in Philadelphia where Duchamp's 'Étant Donnés' is located. That was everything you need to know about art. I would love to go there and see it. It is worth the trip to Philadelphia.

AFH: So what happens to the images you reject for shows?

RK: They get put into all sorts of other junk. A lot of the images I rejected from the last series will be in a book that I'm putting together now of digital images. It's the opposite of what I was talking about. For this, there will just be girls standing there, and that's it. It's the left-over stuff. I'll use the images for other purposes. I have a voyeur book coming out soon, where I just spy on people.

AFH: Really?

RK: No, its all fake. I try to follow models around. It's all fake paparazzi stuff. I have shot tons of pictures out my windows here in my apartment but I can't show them. It just takes one person to see their photo and its all over.

AFH: What are you going to do with the left-overs of the left-overs when you die?

RK: I left everything to my kid. My lawyer asked me what will happen if he becomes a born-again Christian and destroys everything. But I figure, that's fine. I don't care what happens after I die. I think there is enough stuff out there that I'm happy and I just hope my kid can make money off of it all somehow.

AFH: Aren't you worried about your legacy?

RK: You mean, am I worried about turning in to Keith Haring? He is the perfect example of someone whose whole thing got totally destroyed. But I'm not too worried about the corruption of my vision. I have no vision, so I can't be too worried about it getting corrupted.

AFH: Come on.

RK: I do not have a vision. I have ideas I try and execute, but I don't have what is known as a 'vision.'

AFH: But your images are immediately recognizable as yours. Does that betray a consistent signature vision?

RK: I have a style, but I don't have a vision. I've just developed a style but not a vision.

AFH: Alright. So, who are the girls? How many girls have you photographed and where are you finding them?

RK: A lot of times women will email me. I put an ad on Craigslist for the panties project. Out of almost 200 responses from that ad, I got two that were any good. I get recommendations from past models too. I have a long, long list of people to shoot now and never seem to get around to actually taking the pictures.

AFH: From the people who write to you, are they usually familiar with your work? And are they usually right that they are someone you would want to photograph?

RK: I'd say they are right 10% of the time.

AFH: And the other 90%, why do they do it?

RK: I don't know. I get a lot of random people. I've gotten pretty picky. A lot of the girls aren't right for my stuff.

AFH: Do you have a specific aesthetic? There are photographers who have very precise types but what you seem to photograph a diverse range of girls' bodies, faces, styles and sensibilities.

RK: It just has to click in my head somehow. I'm not into fake boobs. Sometimes, I just have to meet the girls.

AFH: Looking through these, I am surprised by the girls who send you glamour shot-style pictures. I'd assume that more girls would send you grainy, amateur shots of themselves in their panties, or something to try and replicate your aesthetic to demonstrate how they would love in your images. But a lot of these girls look like debutantes or those unfortunate girls exploited by fake modeling schools which con them into taking unnecessary, glossy headshots. Are these girls just randomly applying for whatever is out there?

RK: A lot of times, they are cute when you write back; it doesn't make sense. I don't like giant tattoos and things like that. I don't bother. But some send really explicit images. There is one Asian girl with a slave chain around her neck. I liked that. Her body was perfect and she was into bondage. That was cool. I like crazy girls.

AFH: Are you into the whole suicide girl aesthetic? If your pictures really are portraits, then don't tattoos and piercings just demonstrate the girl's personality?

RK: I get a lot of those girls writing to me but I am not interested in that. Its too like the 90's. It was a long time ago. That has gone beyond sexy to me. To me, that's way past sexy. I want a girl who looks like a secretary.

AFH: Do you ever get girls who do become born-again Christians and want you to erase their images from your oeuvre?

RK: That has happened. There was one who knew there was nothing she could do about it. She had shot a million different pictures with a million different people before becoming born-again. I had one girl who was getting married and wanted to buy back the photos. I gave them to her. Sometimes there are girls who write saying that they aren't happy with where the photos are, like on the web. I'll then try to figure out what they are talking about and get them removed.

AFH: That's nice of you. How young are your models?

RK: They are 18-28. I rarely see 18 year-olds though. And I'm fine doing things like removing the images if they offend the girls. I don't want to hurt anyone.

AFH: Do you pose the girls or do they pose for you?

RK: I have to position them for the light and background, then I try to get them to go through some motions that relate to what I'm trying to shoot. Some models hit it right off and some take a while to get comfortable. Usually, for my own stuff, I'm trying to catch them looking like they are not posing. I recently shot Shannon Click , a pro fashion girl, for Nylon. She was so good at "not posing" that we did the whole complicated shoot in about 3 hours.

AFH: Are you a trailblazer for older men who want to photograph pretty, young girls?

RK: All I can say is that, when I was thirteen and thinking about what I wanted to do with my life, all I could think would be fun would be to have naked girls come to my apartment till I was like 100, and I could photograph them or whatever. And that's generally what happened. What am I supposed to do, deny it?