Richard Kern:
Bad Enough To Be Good

PHOTOGRAPHY | RICHARD KERN       WORDS | CLIFFORD THURLOW

HE WAS SITTING in the auditorium in the only cinema in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, but his journey to New York had, metaphorically, just begun. Kern had a passion for the movies and, as the marquee boy em ployed to change the titles outside the picture house each week, he got to see them all. He was growing up in a modest paper-mill town where his father was the editor of the local paper, a job that had him doubling up behind the camera. From a young age, six or seven, Kern recalls accompanying dad on assignments to car crashes, drownings, one time, a rally by the Ku Klux Klan, visual narratives that would lie dormant and later give his work as a photographer a heightened sense of immediacy and drama.

Not long after his encounter with Barbarella, Kern entered the garage of a customer on his paper route; he came across a stack of Playboy magazines and shoved as many as he could carry in his paper bag. 'I didn't feel bad about it. The guy never paid his bills and the guy's wife always came to the door in a see-through negligee as if that evened the score.'

It was the Vietnam era in the United States. Kern was attracted to left politics and 'art' – not a word in the lexicon of most folks in Roanoke Rapids. He studied art, philosophy and politics in college and began making abstract metal sculptures inspired by Anthony Caro. He was reading Art-Rite and similar magazines emerging from the underground scene in New York, a time when music, performance, visual arts and drugs were blending in the heady cocktail that would become the culture.

Kern began taking photographs to document sculpture projects. He launched a series of fanzines: The Heroin Addict, The Valium Addict, the inspired Dumb Fucker, collages of artwork, photography and elegiac streams-of-consciousness; with Jane Fonda his muse and Lou Reed like a siren call from the lofts of the East Village, before the seventies vanished into the bonfire of the vanities era of the Reagan White House, Richard Kern was carving his own eclectic path among the artists and bohemians in the most creative city on earth.

HE CARRIED ON printing fanzines, handing them out on street corners and subway trains. He was hanging out with poets, doing drugs and making movies with a Super-8 he bought for five bucks in a garage sale. He made the two-reeler Goodbye 42nd Street and was barred from entering an open forum because the film was deemed to promote "wrong moral values." At an open screening! He's still shaking his head in disgust. Kern was outraged but admits that it was the sort of attention he craved. Something bad enough to be banned had to be good. He carried on making films about punks, junkies, delinquents, developing a distinctive visual style, his work becoming central in a movement that came to be known as Cinema of Transgression.

In spite of his early passion for the movies, Kern had been thrown out of film classes at college for having a bad attitude. His approach to art was more nihilistic than disciplined and, in all senses, he learned his craft by doing it - and doing it his own way. The art world, as he saw it, was all a question of who you knew and, with his unorthodox style of filmmaking, he became anti-art, anti-sex, anti-relationships, anti-everything. His drug taking had focused his negativity into filmmaking and, when he quit the chemicals, he begun to work on the positive by shooting stills.

Photography for Kern was more intimate; it's something you do with your subject without the mass of people required to collaborate in film. He began shooting his girlfriend naked, then friends – 'basically, anyone who wanted to get naked.' Kern continued in his own auto-didactic style, but admits to falling partially under the influence of Helmut Newton, Duane Michaels and the new wave of Czech photographers. He met Eric Kroll around this time and, while he found his work inspirational, it was Kern's familiarity with movie lighting that gave his early portraits an artistic aesthetic, an individuality.

When the distributors of his early films invited Kern to produce a book, he went to Los Angeles with his box of photographs. He laid them out on a table and it occurred to him that there were nowhere near enough prints. He had twenty good photos, 'maybe ten,' and concluded with honesty that he wasn't a photographer, just a guy taking photographs. He went back to New York determined to work harder, shoot more pictures, take himself seriously for the first time in his life.

He didn't start showing his work in galleries until 1995, and when New York Girls, the book they had been waiting for finally hit the shops, it marked the arrival of a photographer to be taken seriously. He now has seven books on the shelf and his work has been shown in galleries all over the world. He had found his medium, his style: the model an eternal Barbarella in a fantasy with Richard Kern as the voyeur.