Book Description
Richard Kern is the quintessential New York photographer: he's high speed and high contrast. Son of a journalist, he was born in North Carolina, works around the world and lives in his beloved New York. Known for his underground films and bold photographs of naked girls, Kern unselfconsciously invents mischievous erotic stories and shoots them in simple domestic settings. As he once said, "if the model is an exhibitionist then I am a voyeur". In this book, Kern presents a collection of black and white photographs taken since the beginning of his career. In addition to his "girls", this volume also includes a few male nudes and landscapes.
About the Author
Born in 1954 in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, the turning point of Richard Kern's life happened one afternoon in 1971, when he was picked up by a carload of hot, young, scantily-clad New York City glam girls while hitchiking after a day of skipping high school. He was captivated. The end result has been more than two decades of hard, sexually blunt work, starting with early projects like the Cinema of Transgression films made in collaboration with a crew of Lower East Side denizens Lydia Lunch, Nick Zedd, Sonic Youth, and Karen Finley. Kern's recent work has concentrated on the photography of women, and has appeared in
Hustler and
Barely Legal, as well as in the art monographs
New York Girls and
XX Girls.