FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Sex

Kern's Girl Of The Week - Ann

Ann

Every week from now until he gets sick of doing it, Richard Kern will invite us to his L.E.S. apartment and we'll go through a huge box of archival photographs from his long and checkered career. This is the first installment of his new series, cleverly called "Kern's Girl of the Week."

VICE: Where and when was this?
Richard: Right over there in my living room. This was probably 1993, I’m guessing. This was from the New York Girls…

Advertisement

In this same apartment? How long have you lived here?
I’ve lived here since ’88. Yeah, 1988. This was from the New York Girls period when I was using a lot of hot lights and a lot of crazy colors. This is one girl I’ve sold a million times, that’s why I put her in there.

It was when we were shooting all this kind of fetish-y crap. This girl was quite wealthy and just doing modeling for fun. I don’t know what she does now.

How did you find her?
She was one of Eric Kroll’s models, and he introduced me to her. This was when I hung out with Eric a lot. The fetish period was during the late 80s to ’93 or ’94. It was when I was shooting that stuff… But I shot this girl a ton of times. She’s about six feet tall and she wasn't a fashion model. She didn’t care about anything. I shot her in bondage a couple of times. But that period was – it was when I hung out with Kroll a lot and I was shooting all this bondage and real dark, creepy stuff.

These days you never really come across young people who are into fetish and bondage. The fetish crowd are more mid-30s upwards, right?
I think it’s still there. I think it goes in patterns. I remember I was interested in it when I was like 20. Those were the punk rock days, and it was big in fashion then. It was “Oh Bondage, Up Yours”, all that kind of shit. Then it disappeared again. Then it came back briefly in the early 90s – this is the same period where all the tattoos and piercings and all that shit started to appear, it was all about the same time. I was looking at old film footage I have of this period and there’s so much bondage and fetish shit. I mean, now I look at it and… if someone walked into the room when I was about to have sex with them and they were dressed like this, I don’t know what I would think. I mean, it’s one step short of wearing a strap-on and fucking me in the ass.

INTERVIEW BY ANDY CAPPER