Richard Kern

Richard Kern (born: North Carolina, 1954) has lived and worked in New York City since 1979. In the eighties, he produced a series of short films that now are recognized as the central works of the movement now known as the Cinema of Transgression. In the 90’s he switched to photography full time and occasionally directed music videos for bands like Sonic Youth and Marilyn Manson. Kern has published nine books and is a regular contributor to a variety of international publications.

One afternoon in 1971, I skipped my 10th grade classes to hitchhike 30 miles to a mall in Rocky Mount NC on interstate 95. Heading north to get back home, a beat-up old car full of young NYC glam girls returning from Florida stopped for me. I piled in and was immediately captivated. Theirs was a world known to me only through magazines and movies. They told me stories of rock stars they knew and had sex with. They had weird haircuts. Vinyl hot pants, cut-off shorts, halter tops and plafforrn shoes barely concealed their vitality. I sat there in the back seat; crammed between two cute "older girls" (they were eighteen or nineteen) with my mouth hanging open like the hick that I was.

I had already been exposed to photography at this time by my father. As editor of the local newspaper, his job included taking photos of the events he wrote about. -Throughout my adolescence, I accompanied him on night-time assignments to photograph rural news events like car wrecks, drownings or political rallies. In my young mind, "got to go and get a shot" meant an adventure was in the making. My father encouraged my interest by teaching me how to make a camera from a can and how to use the darkroom. I immediately began developing my voyeuristic tendencies.

Now I'm a hick living in NYC. All the photographs in New York Girls (with a few exceptions) were taken in one of the two apartments I've had there since 1979.

My first apartment / studio was a six-room railroad at 529 E.13th Street between Avenues A and B. In this building were three apartments that bagged and distributed heroin, two shooting galleries and several other young artist types like me that moved there for the cheap rent. I converted one room to a darkroom and three others to a workspace where I shot photos of all my friends for use in little Xeroxed magazines I produced. In 1983, I purchased a Super-8 movie camera for five dollars and began documenting my friends acting out "statements". I dragged my projector around to local clubs, showing my early shorts before bands or as wallpaper for huge acid parties. These films featured Nick Zedd, Lydia Lunch, Lung Leg, Cassandra Stark, Sonic Youth, Tommy Turner, David Wojnarowitcz, Karen Finley, Audrey Rose, Clint Ruin and others. We became, thanks to Nick's manifestos and my photographs, visible as the "Cinema of Transgression". 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 most popular of these films, FINGERED, was also the most controversial. At screening after screening, both in the States and abroad, I was routinely booed off the stage, attacked or shut down. Yet, the first time Lydia (the star and instigator of this movie) and I sat down to watch the finished product, she looked at me and said "This isn't hard enough". To me, making these films was like taking a big, fat, smelly dump then standing back and watching people marvel over it.

Around 1987, my lifestyle caught up with me. I got rid of most of my possessions, gave up my apartment and fled to San Francisco. One year of hiding from myself and running around every night with various scary petty criminals sent me running back just as quickly to New York.

Since 1988, I've been living on 3rd Street between Avenues C and D. One thing I'd managed to hang onto throughout my "dark period" was my cameras. I began doing construction work in the daytime and shooting photos whenever I could. Film Threat Video picked up the films I'd been self distributing for years and made them available all around the world. The notoriety I'd established with these films helped me when it came to finding new models to work with. Most of the photos in this book trace me "re-claiming my camera eye" as I've tried to find a replacement for the blood spattered imagery I'm generally known for.

I eventually began producing movies again and made a few rock videos but realized that my true interest is in taking photographs. For me, nothing compares to the experience of building an environment with light then adding a living person as an unknown to make a temporal image. All photographers take pictures so they can tell themselves "I was there". New York Girls shows where I was for the last fifteen years.

The models are New York girls by my definition. At some point, they have all lived in Manhattan, drawn by that yearning for excitement and lifestyle intensity that motivates everyone that moves there. I don't think that there are any Manhattan natives in this book. Some of the women came from nearby Long Island and some arrived from as far away as Japan but they all became New Yorkers by spending time in the downtown scene looking for fun.

(official site)

Richard Kern in conversation with Matthew Higgs: New York 2004.

MH: I believe your father was a photographer?

RK: Not exactly. My father was the managing editor of a daily local newspaper in North Carolina. He was someone who took photographs out of necessity: all the reporters doubled up as photographers, my father included. So calling him a photographer would be, I guess, a stretch. He would simply go on an assignment to cover a story and have to take some photographs whilst he was there. I grew up in a very dull paper-mill town in the South: a place with just one movie theatre, so my father being both a newspaper editor and occasional photographer seemed, at least to a child, like an exciting job.

MH: Did you accompany your father on his assignments?

RK: Yeah. He would take me along from time to time. I spent a lot of my childhood sitting around waiting for him to get finished whilst he was took pictures of people at the local Moose Lodge. Occasionally there were a few interesting trips: like the time he took me to a drowning, or to car crashes, and the time we went to a Ku Klux Klan rally.

MH: How old would you have been?

RK: Around six or seven years old.

MH: Do you remember having any interest in photography as a child?

RK: When I was in Fifth Grade, as part of a science project, my father showed me how to make a pinhole camera. He showed me how to load and process film, and how to take pictures. As a kid I always built model cars, which I was always winning trophies for! I would photograph scenes as if the models were racing down a road, except it was just a set up on the rug in my bedroom, so they weren't really that convincing, but when you are a kid it really looked like the real thing!

MH: What music were you listening to?

RK: The Stooges, The Velvet Underground, and then later the The Ramones. At that time you would go to a party with your Ramones record and put it on and the other people would want to kill you! That kind of reaction just doesn't seem possible now, but at the time it was for real.

MH: When did you move to New York?

RK: Around 1978, or 1979. I had an eight month lay-over in Philadelphia , where I continued putting out the fanzines. Which, when I think back on it, was a direct extension of what my father was doing: he was basically doing a 'fanzine' for my home town - which is what a local newspaper was. When I eventually got to New York it was a whole different thing. I still made fanzines though: I would just leave them lying around everywhere, and people would just stumble across them. The only contact information was a PO Box number.