Every week Richard Kern invites us to his L.E.S. apartment where we go through a huge box of archival photographs from his long and checkered career. This week’s featured model is Mel, a cute French lady who became a photographer in Paris after Richard shot her for a bunch of porno mags.VICE: Who is this?
Richard: This is Mel. She wrote me and said she was French, coming to New York, and wanted to model. I think this was in the late 90s, around ’99. I believe she was coming here to model for Terry Richardson but never found him, and then I started shooting her. This was the first time I shot her, but I worked with her a bunch of times later. She became a photographer, and I think she’s working in Paris now. I shot her for a ton of sex mags. [laughs]Can you sell shots like these to sex mags, or do you have to have them fucking?
Oh, no. Just standing around. You could sell that. The sex mags would buy them as a set. At that time I was shooting for about ten different magazines. You could sell the photos to one mag, then take the same photos and sell them to another mag—you could make a killing at it. This was before the same thing that happened to porno web sites happened to porno magazines. You can get it all free, so why would anyone want to buy the magazines?Previously - Jennifer