Richard Kern Books

New York Girls, first released in 1995, and published by TASCHEN Books in 1996, defined a time, a place, and the raw esthetic of the artist Richard Kern. 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. The text was an interview with Kern by Kim Gordon. All of this predated SuicideGirls by six years and was utterly, supremely cool.To celebrate the 20th anniversary of Kern’s best-known work, TASCHEN is releasing an updated edition with never-published outtakes from the original photo sets, as well as photos rejected as too explicit for the first book and stills from his 25 films. We know you’ve missed Monica, Erin, Jaiko, Jen, Susan, Amy and Sam, and thought you’d enjoy seeing just a bit more of them.

Richard Kern likes real unpretentious, unadorned, and definitely undressed. Those who love Kern know each book is an invitation to join him in his privileged world where natural young women share their most intimate moments. Richard has never lost his boyish curiosity with girls and their secrets, so instead of posing them in sterile sets he follows them through the house―or rather his New York apartment―from backyard to kitchen to bathroom to bedroom, capturing every sexy and embarrassing moment. Action is his most revealing book yet. For 280 pages we careen through the life of Kern, accompanied by dozens of energetic, fun-loving, clothes-dropping exhibitionists. “Young women want to show the world they’re not like their man-hating women’s lib mothers,” a Kern model once told me, and these girls certainly get the point across.

Illustrated with over 180 photographs, this book traces the career of New York's most infamous photographer/filmmaker, Richard Kern. John Waters said of one of Kern's notorious scum-bag Super-8 'Finger is the ultimate date movie for psychos. It's the best hillbilly-punk-art-porno movie in the world and I always show it to people very late at night to make them happy'.

One of the first, and still the most popular series on the internet video site VBS was "Shot by Kern," a concept dreamed up by then editor-in-chief Jesse Pierson to roust photographer Richard Kern from his New York environs and have him shoot women Kern-style around the world. This title presents some 300 of these photographs.

A former heroin addict himself, Kern?s photos offer the opportunity to stare into the far more insidious face of contemporary prescription drug addiction. On the genesis of the project, Kern has said, ?A woman working for me a few years ago told me that she was very jittery because she had taken too much Adderall. When I asked her about taking meds, she said that all of her friends took them too.? The resulting images?young women in their underwear holding up their pill bottles (Valium and Klonopin, but also Relpax, a treatment for migraines) and birth control packets against a background of their own cozily haphazard bathrooms and bedrooms?fall somewhere between scenes of confession and screen grabs from a YouTube tutorial.