Richard Kern

Richard Kern became famous with underground films

Richard Kern was born in 1954 in Roanoke Rapids in the US state of North Carolina, and studied at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1977. He first attracted attention as an artist in the 1980s with erotically orientated experimental films such as The Right Side of My Brain (1985) and Fingered (1986), which featured some of the biggest names in the scene at the time, including Lydia Lunch (born 1959), David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992), Kembra Pfahler (born 1961), Karen Finley (born 1956), Henry Rollins (born 1961) and the group Sonic Youth, for whom Richard Kern shot their first music video Death Valley '69. Like many musicians and artists around him, Richard Kern was also fascinated by the aesthetics of extreme violence, sex and perversion and became an active and driving part of a movement that the American filmmaker and author Nick Zedd (1958-2022) called the Cinema of Transgression.

Breakthrough with erotic fetish photography

Richard Kern began his artistic career with self-produced magazines containing texts and pictures that he and his friends had written and taken. These were simple collections of hand-stitched photocopies that were initially published under the title The Heroin Addict and later renamed The Valium Addict. In the 1970s and 1980s, Russ Meyer's erotic films made a great impression on Kern and also left their mark on his own cinematic experiments, and in the 1980s, he began making underground films and music videos, which established his popularity in the scene. In the 1990s, he focused on erotic photography, which made him famous worldwide - he had learnt how to work with a camera from his father, who had worked as a newspaper photographer in North Carolina. His photo book New York Girls, published in 1995, which deals with the themes of fetishism and bondage, was his breakthrough.

The illustrated books with naked young women are bestsellers

Richard Kern regularly publishes his work in magazines such as Playboy, Purple, GQ and Vice. He often chooses amateur models for his pictures and lets them inspire him to unusual poses and photographic experiments. Although Kern is best known for his explicit photographs of naked women which have made his numerous illustrated books bestsellers, he has also portrayed numerous clothed celebrities, and as a director, has been shooting his own series Shot by Kern for VBS.tv since 2007. The Canadian photographer Petra Collins (born 1992) was mentored by Kern, whilst his short film Manhattan Love Suicides (1985) inspired the British rock band The Manhattan Love Suicides to their name. In his personal life, Kern was married to the artist Martynka Wawrzyniak (born 1979) from 2007 to 2015.

Richard Kern lives and works in New York.