USER
(2002)

Darren Flook on the phone to Richard Kern

I'm surrounded by porn. iD, Dazed, Vogue, The Face, Sleaze Nation, Richardson and a hundred other style and fashion magazines filled, with images that use the language of porn to speak to an audience media sawy to the gap between this pseudo porn and the real thing. This doesn't take into account Loaded, Maxim, FHM and a host of other magazines that trade off a lad image and tabloid 'great tits', 'up for it' propagation of soft porn photos styling. Add to this the internet, OS9S, satellite TV, everything Uncovered, ChannelS and Strippers in the windows of Selfridges and you start to see that what was once underground, hidden territory is now a mainstream obsession. The magazine editors bored of druggy looking kids need a new thing and ad men and TV execs have always known the power of flesh. Whether it's Emmanue/le Fashion or Cheap Bright Plastic, the pornification of society is everywhere. Sex sells and in the new millennium for sex, read porn.

A photograph of a young - very young - looking girl, naked with a shaved crotch, bound wrists and sucking on the end of a double ended dildo that isn't inserted in the crotch mentioned. This is porn. I know this. I've seen porn before. Not a huge, weir~, specialist amount but enough to know that this is it. The picture is in Model Release (2000), a book of photographs by Richard Kern and I'm staring at it trying to work out why all the female art type friends that I canvassed on this matter reckon that Kern is brilliant, fascinating, etc. Another reason I'm staring at the image is that there is something strangely non arousing about this image when it portrays an individual and a situation that I would normally find extremely interesting. It's porn that doesn't work as porn - the use to the User, as Kern would say, is being perverted. This is dysfunctional pornography, art pornography.

Richard Kern came out of the Cinema of Transgression of the New York underground in the 70's. With their scratchy, fake dialogue and a gangs sense of pushing each other, testing their boundaries, the films aren't an easy watch. Kern joked that he stopped doing them when they realised that the one thing they hadn't done was children in the films ­it was time to pull out. In film, or later in the photographs, Kern is capable of doing truly fascinating things with his deliberately hard and narrow genre. Like any good genre artist Kern has the ability to subvert his material, to make it funny, to apparently play by all the rules and yet twist and gently contort his subject into something that can not be what it is telling you it is. This doesn't mean that it isn't porn but it's being used for something different.

Model Release, published by Taschen, opens with the model release form to be signed by Kern and the model for any photo shoot before they begin.

I hereby release, discharge, and agree to defend, indemnify and save harmless the Photographer and Users, their legal representatives, agents, licenses, successors and assigns, and all parties acting under their permission, or with authority from them, or those for whom they are acting, from and against any and all losses, damages, costs, charges, attorneys' fees, recoveries, actions, judgments, penalties, expenses and any other loss whatsoever which may be obtained against, imposed upon or suffered by all or any of them which may arise from the use of such Photographs, even should the same subject me to ridicule, scandal, reproach, scorn, or indignity, and from any liability as a result of any distortion, blurring or alteration, optical illusions or use in composite form, either intentionally or otherwise, that may occur or be reproduced in the taking, processing or reproduction of the finished product, or its publication or distribution, or which may arise from any breach of any warranty, representation, covenant or agreement made by me. I waive any claim that I may have for alleged violation of privacy, defamation or libel by the use of such Photographs.

Richard Kern was born in 1954 in Roanoke Rapids in North Carolina and has lived in New York since 1979. He emerged as a film maker in New York in the 1980's working with artists such as Lydia Lunch and Sonic Youth. Kern has published his photographs in magazines including Barely Legal, Juggs, Tight, and Finally Legal and number of books including New York Girls (1997) and Model Release (2000) I spoke with Richard down a bad telephone line earlier this year when he was selecting work for his upcoming show at the ICA, London.

Darren Flook: When you're selecting work for a show like this is it being themed or...how are you selecting the work?
Richard Kern: Honestly. I'm going through the shots I have and seeing which ones I wanna pay to have printed - that's a big part of it. Which ones are the best? A lot of it is going back overtime -which of these do I wanna bring into existence. It takes forever sometimes you know.

DF: Is it a very different process from selecting work for a book?
RK: It's similar, but with a book there is a lot more leeway. There are so many pages, and the time period is fixed. There are works in all the books that if I went back I'd take out and other images I can't believe I put in, but that happens with exhibitions too. The last time I did a show in New York - by the time I got a couple of them framed and the show opened, I was looking at them and thinking 'I fucking hate these fucking shots' you know?

DF: D0 you take a different audience into account? The difference between who is going to see the work in a book, a magazine and in a public gallery, do you see these as different?
RK: Well they're all the same. But books have more pages, and with shows some things just don't work. People look at the books and say they have a favorite picture and l'm'like 'I fucking hate that'. Then other people say they like it and I don't even get it. Then I try to like it because people seem to respond to it. Then it ends up getting in the show anyway and has a great response, but I'm not necessarily into it. I'm always going over images I shot like a year, two years ago, and editing and re-editing. That's where I am now for this show. It's this constant situation.

DF: And when you're selecting work for an exhibition like this, how do you decide, that was a porn image and now I'll use it in a show. What makes an image change like that?
RK: Well by the time of the show, the porn shoot has faded away you know. And about 90 percent of the time, stuff that is porn can't really be used anywhere else. But a lot of the stuff in Model Release is stuff that was taken during a porn shoot but just didn't relate to it. It was too ridiculous for porn.

DF: Is that the editors decision?
RK: No. Because before I send anything off I pull all the stuff I like for me.

DF: So the same images wouldn't appear in the porn mags that appear in the books or exhibitions?

RK: No. Similar, but not the same. There's this shot of this girl that's in the show that was taken in a bathroom in Dundee. She's pulling down her panties, but it's all wrong for porn. She not looking at the camera or anything. The magazine got a very similar image but it really conforms to porn. She's smiling and looking at you and everything.

DF: So there are rules that have to followed?
RK: Yeah. Like you have to be showing something in every single shot. In theory.

DF: So how long have you been taking this kind of work?
RK: I started taking porn shots in the early 90's, overlapping with the films a bit. Mostly black and white stuff. Then around '93, '94, I started being able to sell stuff to magazines. But you know, a shot of this girl, a shot of that girl, the odd group shot. Then around the same time I started doing rock videos, and it was during the 3rd or 4th video that I starting selling stuff to Barely Legal. It was this new kind of magazine, a new concept. Girls that had just become legal. It was all fresh. It was counter to the whole 80's, early 90's thing of girls having giant hair and fake boobs. It was just like a return to innocence. Kinda. But basically it was there to appeal to all the paedophiles. Those people who want to look at really young girls, and it's not legal to do that, so along came all these magazines which were just the youngest of the young girls. You know. It was to appeal to them.
I was interested in this point, about paedophiles, about Kern's stance on this. After all he is a father himself.

DF: There is one bit (in this conversation) where you say that you are basically aware that magazines such as Barely Legol are used by people with paedophile tendencies, because the girls in Barely Legollook so young. Is this ever problematic for you, or not? You don't have to answer this, but I'm sort of interested
RK: The pedophiles thing, I'm not too sure about. What I meant was that the mags were aiming at the youngest legal age that they could get away with so that the mags would appeal to people that were fed up with hard, used up looking bleached blond fake tit girls that were the norm at the time. I tend to think of pedophiles going after kids younger than 18, a lot younger in fact. It would seem that 13 and under would suit that group. Barely legal is based around girls that aren't experienced. They also hint at stepfather / daughter incest type things. Anything that is "Barely legal."

DF: There is the thing you do at the back of Model Release where you have shot the girls holding their Drivers Licenses and 10's.
RK: Yeah. I always do that with them.

DF: And now for the new show you have the girls before the shoot. Straight on, no make up.
RK: I've been doing those for about a year now. Against the wall. Not posing. They're not ready. Dead pan. Before they become... and you can see how average most of them are.

DF: It must be strange for girls who come to you who don't know who you are and don't know what you do. Why is he taking this?
RK: The girls who do porn regular. The girls from agencies - they couldn't give a shit. All they care about is if they get their pay-cheque. But there are girls who won't be photographed without the ridiculous make-up and hair. It's a hang-up they have. And there are some images that I just want. The girl with the meat on her face? I wanted that girl with the meat. I did this whole stupid fashion shoot just so I could get that girl with meat.

DF: Do you suggest most of the things like that or do the girls suggest things as well?
RK: It's me. I say 'We got this. Stick it on your eye'. But one time I was doing that and the girl said 'but Helmut Newton did this', and I'm 'Oh fuck, that's right!' Like that one of the girl with bloody nose. I was doing a porn shoot with her that day, in fact I did two that day. Anyway, at the end of the day I was at my publishers house, Taschen, in Germany, and the publishers daughter comes in with a bloody nose having bumped into something. And I thought 'Hey that's a great shot. I can do that!' Because I have this whole series of girls doing something. And thinking of things for girls to do in states of undress is really hard.

Richard Kern is at the ICA, London 19 July - B September 2002