SHOT BY KERN

Richard Kern, photographer and filmmaker remains, first and foremost, a portraitist.   For more than two decades Kern has sought to unravel and illuminate the complex and often darker sides of human nature.

Kern makes the psychological space between the sitter, photographer and audience his subject. With his dry, matter of fact approach, he underlines the absurdity of truth and objectivity in photography while playing with our reliance upon taxonomies around sexual representation. 
Kern’s images have been widely published in Purple, Vice, V Magazine and Italian GQ as well as in his numerous books and exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum and in more than 30 solo shows around the world.

http://www.richardkern.com/

Richard Kern is one of the most raw, uncompromising voices to emerge from the Lower East Side counterculture of 1980s New York City. Straddling the line between underground filmmaker and portrait photographer, Kern became a defining pillar of the Cinema of Transgression—a movement that rejected both mainstream Hollywood and the increasingly polite art world in favor of something deliberately confrontational, low-budget, and gritty.

The Super 8 Shockwaves: Cinema of Transgression

In the early 1980s, Kern, alongside filmmaker Nick Zedd (who coined the movement's name), began shooting micro-budget films on grainy Super 8 infrastructure. Their manifesto was simple: shock the audience out of apathy. Kern’s early shorts—like You Killed Me First (1985) and Fingered (1986)—delved into psychological isolation, domestic dysfunction, and extreme taboo, capturing the dark, drug-fueled energy of the era's East Village.

His work became intrinsically tied to the post-punk and noise rock music underground:

• Lydia Lunch: The no-wave icon starred in, co-wrote, and brought her signature confrontational energy to several of Kern's most notorious early projects.

• Sonic Youth: Kern directed the chaotic, terrifying music video for their legendary 1985 track "Death Valley '69."

• Lung Leg: An enigmatic underground actress who became one of Kern's most enduring early muses.

The Photographic Shift: Raw, Direct Portraiture

As the 1990s approached, Kern shifted his primary focus from narrative filmmaking to stark, unblinking portrait photography. While his themes remained deeply tied to subversion, youth culture, and eroticism, his technical execution stripped away the narrative chaos to focus entirely on the subject.

Kern’s photography style is instantly recognizable for its lack of idealization:

• Direct, Harsh Lighting: He favored simple on-camera flash or harsh, natural apartment light over elaborate studio setups, giving his work a candid, voyeuristic texture.

• Environmental Realism: Rather than clean backdrops, his subjects are framed against the cluttered realities of small NYC apartments, unmade beds, and peeling wallpaper.

• The Unpolished Gaze: His portraits focus heavily on the psychological tension between the subject and the lens. There is no airbrushing; the freckles, bruises, and expressions are left entirely intact.

By chronicling the alternative, punk, and youth subcultures of New York with such directness, Kern's raw aesthetic heavily influenced the rise of indie magazine photography and alternative fashion editorials throughout the late 90s and 2000s.

Richard Kern didn’t just document the 1980s New York noise rock scene—he was structurally hardwired into it. In the mid-1980s, the line between underground filmmaker, photographer, and noise musician in the Lower East Side was completely porous. The same people playing abrasive, feedback-laden gigs at CBGB or the Pyramid Club at night were bleeding and screaming in front of Kern’s Super 8 camera by day.

His work became the visual counterpart to the sonic violence of No Wave and early noise rock, bound together by a shared obsession with psychological decay, urban alienation, and raw shock value.

Sonic Youth and "Death Valley '69"

Kern's most famous musical intersection is his direction of Sonic Youth’s very first music video for "Death Valley '69" (1985), a track tracking the psychological debris of the Manson Family murders. Co-directed with conceptual artist Judith Barry, the video is a scuzzy, jittery masterpiece of low-budget horror.

• The Visual Style: Shot primarily on handheld Super 8, the video features the band members interspersed with bloody, mock-crime scene footage. It has an unsteady, voyeuristic texture that feels more like a bootleg true-crime tape than a promotional music video.

• The Muse: The video heavily incorporated footage from Kern’s short film Submit to Me (1985), showcasing his iconic early muse, Lung Leg, running wild and covered in fake blood.

• The Impact: Despite its abrasive, taboo imagery, the video actually managed to get played on MTV in late 1986 and early 1987, serving as a jarring Trojan horse for the NYC underground to infiltrate mainstream television.

Lydia Lunch: The Ultimate Co-Conspirator

If Sonic Youth provided the theme song, No Wave icon Lydia Lunch was the spiritual engine behind Kern’s most intense cinematic work. Lunch had already established herself as a nihilistic force with her band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, and her collaborative chemistry with Kern resulted in some of the foundational texts of the Cinema of Transgression.

• The Right Side of My Brain (1985): A brutal, 23-minute short film written by and starring Lunch, tracking themes of sexual self-destruction and trauma. The instrumental score for the film—a collaboration between Lunch and Lucy Hamilton—was released as a standalone record called The Drowning of Lucy Hamilton on Lunch's own Widowspeak label.

• Fingered (1986): A deeply controversial, black-and-white featurette starring Lunch and bartender/actor Marty Nation. It pushed the boundaries of underground film with its raw, aggressive depiction of an abusive road trip. Lunch's spoken-word monologues provided a suffocating atmosphere that mirrored the abrasive clatter of the noise music she championed.

Blurring the Lines: The Wider Circle

The cross-pollination extended well past Lunch and Sonic Youth. The entire scene operated like an insular, chaotic theater troupe:

• Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth later teamed up with Lydia Lunch and drummer Sadie Mae to form the short-lived, heavy blues-noise project Harry Crews, named after the gritty Southern Gothic author whom both Kern and Lunch deeply admired.

• Kern frequently utilized the sounds and presence of J.G. Thirlwell (better known as Foetus, Clint Ruin, or Scraping Foetus Off the Wheel), whose industrial noise textures perfectly tracked the metallic, claustrophobic anxiety of Kern's editing style.

• This DIY music video ethos carried directly into the 90s, paving the way for Kern to direct equally strange, subversive mainstream videos like King Missile's "Detachable Penis" and Marilyn Manson's "Lunchbox".

Ultimately, Kern’s lens gave the 80s noise rock scene its physical form. He captured these musicians not as rock stars, but as desperate, sweaty characters navigating the crumbling, pre-gentrified landscapes of the East Village.

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By the mid-2000s, Vice magazine was cementing its reputation for raw, unfiltered gonzo journalism. In 2007, then-editor-in-chief Jesse Pearson cooked up a way to merge the magazine's edgy video aesthetic with underground art royalty: he launched the "Shot by Kern" series on Vice's online video network, VBS.TV.

The premise was simple but effective: yank Richard Kern out of his comfortable Lower East Side apartment environment and put him on a global road trip with a video crew in tow. Over several years, Kern traveled across countries like Russia, France, Sweden, Brazil, Bulgaria, and Poland to find and photograph local, non-professional women.

Inside the Episodes

Instead of a standard behind-the-scenes photography feature, the video series functioned as a hybrid documentary and an intimate psychological profile. Each episode followed a distinct blueprint:

• The Reality Check: Viewers watched the actual travel, the chaotic apartment or hotel room setups, and the unvarnished casting process.

• Portraiture in Real-Time: The camera rolled while Kern shot the women in his signature lo-fi, direct style. It captured models doing completely mundane, everyday activities—like brushing their teeth, putting on makeup, or lounging in messy beds—stripped of commercial glamour.

• Candid Conversations: The real anchor of the show was the dialogue. The crew interviewed the models extensively, giving them an open platform to speak entirely honestly about their relationship with their bodies, nudity, sex, and personal boundaries. Interspersed throughout were Kern's own commentary on his history, creative choices, and observations.

The Multimedia Legacy

The internet series became a massive hit during the early boom of web video. Its popularity eventually culminated in two major physical releases:

1. The VBS DVD Box Set (2011): A compilation packaging all 20 episodes mapping out his global photography excursions.

2. The Taschen Monograph: Alongside the video release, high-end art publisher Taschen released a massive book also titled Shot by Kern. It showcased over 300 full-color, previously unreleased photographs that Kern captured on the fly during those exact Vice road trips.

The project bridged the gap between Kern's 1980s underground, boundary-pushing past and the hyper-accessible, voyeuristic culture of the early internet era.

Alex Coghe's breakdown of Richard Kern's work offers an insightful evaluation of Kern's raw photographic career and how his provocative style became an influential fixture in contemporary portrait photography.

The Concept

The project was originally conceived by then-VICE editor-in-chief Jesse Pearson. The goal was to take Kern out of his usual New York City environment and document him traveling globally to shoot "Kern-style" portraits of women.

Over several years, Kern traveled to countries including Brazil, Russia, Bulgaria, Italy, and Sweden. The series focused on "real women" rather than professional fashion models, capturing them in their own apartments or local settings.

The Casting Process

Unlike traditional fashion shoots, "Shot by Kern" relied heavily on the burgeoning power of the internet and the "prosumer" desire for self-documentation. Subjects were often:

• Volunteers: Fans of Kern’s work who reached out via MySpace or email.

• Non-Professionals: Students, artists, and office workers rather than agency-signed models.

• The "Kern Girl" Archetype: Kern looked for women who possessed a specific blend of awkwardness, intelligence, and a willingness to be seen without the "mask" of professional retouching.

Key Themes and Aesthetic

Kern’s work in this series is noted for several recurring motifs:

• Intimacy in the Ordinary: He often shoots subjects performing mundane tasks like brushing teeth, applying makeup, or using technology.

• The "Male Gaze" and Voyeurism: Kern openly plays with the concept of the voyeur, often placing the camera in positions that feel like a "peek" into a private moment (e.g., peering through legs or from under a bed).

• Super-Realism: Moving away from the high-contrast, dramatic lighting of his early 80s work, this series uses natural or "matter-of-fact" lighting to emphasize the reality of the subjects.

• Testing Boundaries: Kern has described the process as a "test" for the models—many of whom reach out to him specifically to see how they look through his lens.

Notable Media & Books

• The Web Series: Available originally on VBS.tv/VICE, following the casting and behind-the-scenes of the shoots.

• The Book: Published by Taschen (2013), edited by Dian Hanson. It includes 300+ photographs and an hour-long video with a soundtrack by Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore.

• The DVD: VBS Presents: Shot by Kern, collecting 20 episodes of the travel series.

Institutional Recognition

Despite the controversy, Kern's work is collected by prestigious institutions including:

• The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)

• The Whitney Museum of American Art

• The Kunsthalle Wien

Today, "Shot by Kern" stands as a historical document of the "VICE Era" of the early 2000s, capturing a specific moment when the underground, the internet, and the mainstream fashion world collided.

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