Kern it On
His personal work led to assignments with porn magazines, which in turn have led to shooting fashion stories for cutting-edge publications. Michelle Golden looks at the double life of Richard Kern.

In a spread for this month’s issue of the fashion magazine Spoon, underground filmmaker and Taschen-published photographer Richard Kern didn’t have far to look for inspiration for the Versace layouts he was photographing. Infusing the images with “Eighties porn” flavor wasn’t hard for a photographer who has been shooting for the likes of Penthouse, Taboo and Juggs for the past half decade.

It’s a short jump from Hustler to Helmut Lang these days. Boogie Nights and lad mags have made porn chic, and commercial shooters like Larry Sultan and David LaChapelle are turning out X-rated material. Kern’s just making the natural step in the opposite direction. Currently, he is “being groomed for fashion,” his rep Gina-Alyse Lengyel at Vue Represents Artist Management says. This month alone, he’ll have layouts in the aforementioned Spoon as well as Delicae Vitae, and his third spread for Flaunt is on its way in March.

“His experience in the pornography market is what makes Richard a novelty right now,” says Lengyel of the soft-spoken North Carolina-born photographer. “People are attracted to him in that capacity but then are drawn to other elements of his work, especially the way he combines portraiture with sexuality. ”

Already notorious in the late Eighties for his fanzines and Super-8 films, Kern says he “started shooting naked women around 1990,” beginning with girlfriends, and then widening his circle. “I would ask everybody I knew, and sooner or later I got into a group of people who were all exhibitionists, and they all wanted to be photographed.” Five years of shooting with his low-end 35mm Nikon eventually produced New York Girls, initially published in England and then picked up and released by Taschen in the States. A visual document of early 90s feminism, the book runs the gamut from chicks with guns to badass schoolgirls to Goth kids, and raunchy yet female-empowered scenes of domination and bondage—all local women dressing up and stripping down.

On the recommendation of a friend, Kern sent some of those shots into Hustler. “At the time,” relates Kern, “it was the early Nineties, and yet most of the porn mags still had an Eighties sensibility. It was about big hair, big fake tits, in a studio setting. Hustler was coming out with a magazine, and the concept was that the girls had just turned 18, they were all natural, all fresh.”

Richard’s local ladies scored with the magazines, and Barely Legal, as it turned out, spawned a slew of imitators. “By that time, people were sick of all the artificiality,” says Kern, and after they accepted his shots, he was “off and running” in the industry.

Soon he was shooting for them as well as Penthouse and Playguy among others, receiving about $2,500 for the average shoot—half a day of work. Dian Hanson, editor of Juggs and Leg Show, said Kern’s cool-lit location-based (shot mostly in his apartment) photos ran in almost every issue of Leg Show. “He brought a hint of realism to the glamour style that most Leg Show readers liked. He made them look like believable women you could actually meet.”

His ability to shoot narrative sequences made him particularly marketable in the porn world. “In a sex magazine, you have to tell a story. The readers are always asking for longer pictorials so that the stories could be developed more fully. You’re not dealing with idiots here,” Hanson continues. “Of course, there are stupid people who look at porn, but . . .with Leg Show, which caters to a fetish audience, these tend to be white-collar educated people with very strong imaginations. Getting it right for them is no easy skill.”

Kern’s penchant for naturalism and narrative played well in other magazines as well. In Tight, he explains, “they want it to look really amateurish. It’s supposed to look like college girls taking pictures of each other.” The porn world’s do-it-yourself esthetic mirrored Kern’s earlier film and ’zine style. He could produce work “in three or four hours with a girl [usually a friend or acquaintance] and two or three lights max.”

And while he continued shooting for the magazines, Kern would often use the forum of pornography in his personal work, either by re-using poses from his magazine spreads, or by pulling pictures he liked from those shoots for his own use. His most recent Taschen book, Model Release, is a collection of images that distinctly blurs the line between the personal and professional.

“[The pornography] originally grew out of my personal work, but then it just took over. I started cannibalizing my own work,” he says, “and it all just became the same. At some point, the personal thing just got lost in the need to make money.”

But after years in the porn business, Kern found that his “heart just wasn’t in it anymore.” He muses, “With porn, I don’t care how you dress it up, it’s always the same. You may have different story lines, but you’re still going to get to those [hard-core full-frontal] images over and over again.”

Contributing further to his disillusionment was the economics of what Hanson calls “the declining pornographic environment.” Once both publishers and customers paid a hefty price for pornographic content; now that free porn is widely available on the Internet, the industry finds itself struggling, folding magazines into each other, hiring photographers for fewer shoots and only purchasing second rights for the photos. Kern himself says that he went from shooting for four companies to two in the past year.

So now Kern is wholeheartedly embracing the challenge of fashion photography. He’s been working with his rep Lengyel for the past six months, racking up shoots with “career builders” like Flaunt and Purple, which beef up his portfolio and “allow him to form relationships where both publication and photographer grow together,” she says. “He’s opening himself to the commercialization of his work,” she continues. And so far, the response has been positive.

“The reason it’s appropriate for Richard to be successful in both fashion and pornography,” says Hanson, “is that he understands that both, when done well, are driven by the allure of clothing, whether it’s stockings, designer shoes or panties. He sees how something becomes erotically charged with the addition of the right items of clothing.”

Additionally, what Hanson calls “the basic full-spectrum skills of the pornographer,” the ability to “come up with 20 pages of usable materials from a five- hour shoot” gives him an advantage as well. Whether it’s his hunky male coworkers loosening their ties after-hours and getting down for a boys-only night with some Veuve Cliquot, or an Anna Wintour look-a-like flashing her panties for Delicae Vitae, his spreads are little page-turners with a humorous edge.

So are the days of grungy images of what Hanson describes as “people in cold East Village apartments” gone? Not quite. Kern will soon embark on assignment to Nevada for Hustler to photograph a grandmother, mother and daughter team of prostitutes. He’s also shooting for three new “high-quality” and “hard-core” compilation books for Taschen, which will be edited by Hanson, and published this fall.

“Richard has evolved quite a bit,” says Hanson, who has known him since 1996. “He is a different man. He’s got a happy relationship and a child he loves very much, and he’s moving toward different kinds of material.” He shoots with what he calls a “softer style” now. It’s a different time, a different place, and “I’m just not all about the gloom and doom anymore,” he shrugs.

--