About This Image

Signed, titled, dated, and editioned 3/10 in pencil on verso. Matted and framed with plexiglas and black wood contemporary frame. Overall good condition. Considerable undulations to the top and bottom edges visible through window mat. Cornered to a window mat and framed under UV acrylic measuring 27 x 20-1/2 inches.

Richard Kern was born in 1954 in Roanoke Rapids, NC, where he attended art studies. He has lived and worked in New York since 1979, the year in which he began photographing drug dealers and penniless artists and friends who frequented his studio.

Kern was a leading figure in the 1980s Cinema of Transgression, director of the iconic films You Killed Me First, Fingered and Submit to Me Now; producer of Sonic Youth's "Death Valley '69" and Marilyn Manson's Lunchbox music videos; and a pioneering zine publisher responsible for The Heroin Addict and The Valium Addict.

After kicking his own heroin habit, Kern turned to still photography, shooting girls in his downtown, punk-inflected New York social circle. They were naked, bold, tattooed, pierced, and casually posed in minimal sets, mostly just Richard's ratty slum apartment. They were young, but not innocent, fully complicit in the bondage, gunplay, and infamous candle insertions.

Kern has always defined himself "ironically" as a provincial with voyeuristic inclinations, although he is considered a "master" of photography and underground culture, an interpreter of a New York that manifests itself in its most provocative and cynicism-filled sides.

Kern is also a former guitarist for the Black Snakes. He has several books published on his photography work, including Model Release; Super High; Extra Action; and Richard Kern: New York Girls (20th Anniversary).

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