AN INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD KERN

Our featured photographer today is Richard Kern. To accompany his photo is this interview we did with him that originally appeared in The Vice Photo Book in 2007. Enjoy.

When did you start taking pictures?
When I was maybe ten years old. I’d make model cars and arrange them in little scenarios and then take photos of them with my Instamatic. It meant a lot to me, just taking pictures. Now my son is near that age and he takes pictures. He just walks around and snaps photos of things. Then I did fanzines when I was in college. A lot of the reason for doing them was to publish these surrealist-type photos I was shooting. Then I realized that that you get known a lot faster from movies and stuff than from photos—at least this was what I thought. So I started making films and using my photos as promos for the films.

Yeah and then you made these total cult punk movies for years. Why did you quit doing them?
Around 1992, I just ran out of steam. The last one I made was called My Nightmare and it’s me fantasizing about this girl I know. I was doing a lot of photographs around this time, and I’m fantasizing about this girl I’m going to shoot and jerking off and having all these flash-forwards to when she’s gonna be there and then she shows up and I just come, and she walks in and I try to do all this stuff and she doesn’t want me to do anything. The whole point of the movie was I really wanted to do all this stuff to this girl and since I filmed it, I got to actually do it.

So with the movie camera you got to do stuff you couldn’t do in real life.
Yes, and it’s the same thing with taking photographs.

Do you have a favorite girl you’ve shot?
No, because there’s always somebody new. I can tell you some favorites though. There was one named Alisa. She was this Russian girl who was like 22 and went to Julliard. She was a classical musician. She like entered into that world, just being in photographs, had shots in tons and tons of magazines, and was super popular. I got tons of good photos, she did all this crazy shit for me. But then she just wandered back out again and disappeared.

You’ve photographed the Scottish artist Lucy McKenzie a lot too.
Yeah. She was really into Cosey Fanni Tutti from Throbbing Gristle. That was very interesting for me, because when I was like 20 or 21, I’d seen these porno mags with Cosey in them. I was like, “This is the girl from Throbbing Gristle and she’s in a porno mag!” Lucy discovered her and she was really into it, so she did the same thing.

So were you guys doing it as like a cover of what Cosey had done?
Well, just as like an intellectual exercise, the same way Cosey did it. It all accumulated in England with a show I had, and we had a panel with Lucy, Cosey, and me.

Is Lucy still cool with all the photos you guys took now that she is getting famous as an artist?
Yeah, she doesn’t give a shit.

Maybe since she’s an artist it’s a totally different story. There are probably plenty of normal girls whose lives could be ruined by being in porno photos.
Oh yeah, for sure. But those girls’ lives are probably going to get ruined anyway, whether they do this stuff or not.

The porno business is dark.
And it’s gotten darker. I get these model one-sheets everyday, from all the porn agents, and it’s like, “She does double penetration, swallows, facial, cream pie, snowball, interracial, double anal, double vag.” But it’ll say something like, “No tickling.” Some weird personal thing. And then it’ll say, “Age: 18.”

And they used to just say if they did anal or not.
Yeah, and that would be something you’d get to once you’d been shooting forever and exhausted every possible means. Then you could always go back and do that. Now it’s just like they start that way. I shot one girl who was 18 and she said, “I did my first interracial anal gangbang yesterday.”

Jesus, how old was her asshole?
That’s what I wanted to say: “Can I see how pink your butt is?” She was like, “That’s something I’ve always wanted to do. I knew since I was twelve that I wanted to be in porno.” And it’s like, how do people even know that? But I guess, I don’t know, you look at some kids’ MySpace pages now and it’s pretty obvious.

Can you run off the names of some porno mags you’ve shot for?
Barely Legal, Tight, Live Young Girls, Finally Legal, Candy Girls…

That’ll do.
Juggs, we should say Juggs.

OK: Juggs. But let’s talk about Vice now. Do you remember the first time you saw a copy of it?
Fuck, I don’t know. I think I saw that store you guys used to have in LA before I saw the magazine.

Oh god. We got out of the retail business, thank god.
Of course I thought it was a sex store at first, and then I noticed that it was this, like, young person’s store with cool, trendy clothes in it. I must have seen the magazine around though once I started noticing Terry’s photos on the covers.

How did we first contact you?
Wait, before we go on I need to tell you that my Vice subscription is fucked up again. I never get it!

I’ll take care of that. Sorry.
Yeah, I’ve heard that one before! [laughs] Anyway, the first person to contact me was your old photo editor, Tim Barber. I knew the magazine by then. I knew some of the people who you worked with and I thought it would be good to shoot for you.

The first story you did was that fashion portfolio of teachers, right?
Yeah. I would never do a story like that now. I’ll only do stuff now that really fits into my interests.

Now it’s all about the bottom line.
Yep! It’s got to make me some money somehow, or it’s got to fit in with one of my art series. I’ve got a bunch of series going. I’m wrapping up this voyeur stuff now.

That’s like, girls being spied on through windows and tree branches?
Yeah. I just did a shot down at the tennis courts by the East River for that series the other day. I ripped off those Anna Kournikova shots where you can see her panties, except with my photos you can see her bush.

Nice.
Then I have this series of girls doing things, like domestic chores. It’s all about there being a plausible reason for the girl to be naked.

A reasonable expectation of nudity.
Like there’s a point to it. Like the shot of my girlfriend scrubbing the floor. She usually is naked when she does that for real.

Because she doesn’t want to get her clothes dirty or because you ask her to be?
Ha. Because she doesn’t want her clothes dirty. Every girl I’ve asked cleans naked.

I’ve never seen that. What the fuck?
You’re living in the wrong life or something, then. [laughs]

Why do this series of girls doing stuff that might have them naked for real?
I got to this point where I was shooting all these girls doing all this crazy shit, and I started to have a crisis like, “God, what am I doing?” I thought that if I could justify it to myself better, they would stop looking at my stuff as porno in the art world! The voyeur stuff is the same thing. They’re not just naked.

I guess you get asked, “Why do you shoot all these young girls” a lot.
I still haven’t been able to justify that one. I kind of gave up trying to. My answer is, “Because it’s fun.”

JESSE PEARSON