The New York Post
May 17, 2001

Beauty's in the Lens...
of Photog Richard Kern, Who Loves New York Girls
by James Gardner

Richard Kern is hardly a household name, but in pockets of Paris, San Francisco and Berlin, his fame as a photographer surpasses even Robert Mapplethorpe's.

He is most famous in the East Village, where he has lived and worked since the '80s, capturing on film the neighborhood's air of menacing and slightly baroque decrepitude.

The 46-year-old Kern accomplished this not by photographing crumbling row houses but a species of "New York Girls" in a 1995 book of that name.

Now the prestigious German Taschen books has brought out "Model Release," a sequel to Kern's underground best seller. Several dozen of the images in the book, mostly nudes, go on view this evening at the Feature Inc. gallery in Chelsea.

Challenging every norm of beauty and even pornography, Kern's New York Girls are scruffy, disabused and cynically impertinent. Typically, they study at Parsons or the New School, read Foucault and Bukowski, listen to techno and shave only when they feel like it.

Like many quintessential New Yorkers, Kern comes from somewhere else, specifically, Rocky Mount, S.C.

Kern - who seems to cultivate the look of a cleanshaven, if slightly gangly, adolescent fresh from the sticks - is the product of a solid Baptist upbringing. He comes across as scrupulously polite and respectful. To this day, his mother isn't exactly sure what he does in New York.

Kern had his epiphany one day while cutting class in 10th grade. "I was hitchhiking to a mall 30 miles away when this beat-up old car full of young N.Y.C. glam girls stopped for me. They had weird haircuts, vinyl hot pants and platform shoes. I sat there in the back seat with my mouth hanging open, like the hick I was."

As soon as he could, Kern headed for New York. But it was years before he began photographing his girls.

He made a name for himself as a pioneer of the "cinema of transgression." These short little movies parody film noir, with titles such as "The Evil Cameraman," "You Killed Me First" and "Submit to Me Now." Kern associates them with a darker period of his life, when he was hooked on heroin. He make some influential videos of groups like Marilyn Manson and Sonic Youth before abandoning film altogether.

Kern, who has a fine arts degree, sells his portraits for $900 to $2,300. He also peddles some of them to pornographic magazines, including Barely Legal, Finally Legal, Tight and Taboo.

As pornography goes, his subjects are not to everyone's taste - there are no implants, no big hair. One unglamorous young woman brushes her teeth, another flosses, a third stands stupidly with her finger in her nose. There's a moral element to Kern's work. The overwhelming message seems to be that freedom is good, whether it's the freedom of a photographer to expose his obsessions, of a sitter to expose her body or of viewers to indulge their fantasies.

This is the freedom those women in hot pants incarnated for Kern all those years ago. For the kids of small-town America, it's the freedom that has always made New York the center of their desires and the most amazing place in the world.