youve been taking photos of girls for almost thirty years. will you ever tire of them? will you photograph girls for the rest of your life? do you think of them as girls or women?

I don’t see any reason to stop taking photos of women. Photographing naked girls was a career change for me when I started doing it seriously at age 34. At the time, I thought that it would be a nice occupation to have as I grew older. Sometimes I think of the models as girls and sometimes as women.

what keeps your interest?

Trying to think of new things to do within a cliché-ridden format.

when did you start mashing panties and bras into your photos? how did that happen? A fashion magazine asked me to shoot Kate Moss and told me that she would do whatever I wanted for the photos. I’d been reading about the crazy prices people were paying for clothes worn by Marilyn Monroe at auction. Each piece in the auction was shown with a photo of Marilyn wearing the item as proof that it was authentic. I thought that I would shoot Kate in a bunch of different panties, frame up the panties with the photos and sell them. The magazine didn’t get approval for the shoot and I never got to shoot Kate Moss so I had to alter my plan. I was thinking of shooting celebs in panties because I’d heard that perverts pay for used panties (and stockings etc) along with photos of women wearing them. Because it was going to be hard to get celebrities to model for me in their underwear, I decided to go for this simpler plan. Once someone is seen in a photograph hanging on a wall or in a magazine or book, they gain a kind of celebrity anyway. Art collectors, memorabilia collectors and panty collecting perverts all share a similar desire to own something that has been ‘touched’ by a specific person.

wasn’t upskirts going to be a video? howd it turn into photo? is this the first time youve ganged images?

The upskirts thing started as a photo project. I then decided to make an upskirts video. I’m still working on it. There’s accompanying video to most all my projects. In the early ‘80s I ‘ganged’ Xerox copies of my photos for a few shows. These groupings were put on the wall with wheat paste – like the posters you see around town. A poet friend, Montanna Houston, made a cut-up poem from NY Post headlines that went in the center of each piece. These were easy to show because I only had to send a box of copies to a gallery in another city – I didn’t have to go and hang the show. The only time I did this in NYC was for a show organized by David Wonjarowitz in an abandoned building on the westside docks around 1983 or 1984.

how difficult is it to make a sexually explicit photo that operates in the art context? one doesn’t see so many of them, or rather many successful ones, especially outside of photography.

This might sound stupid but I don’t think of these as sexually explicit photos. It would take me several pages to answer that question so I’m going to skip this one.

i think of your photos as being casually restrained in every way: no real glam, low on acting, slyly close to amateur on lighting and props…conceptualy rather flat….do you think of them that way? is this something you’ve developed?

I don’t think too much about the technique unless I’m working on a job. For my personal work the main things I think about are what the girl will be wearing, where we will be shooting and how I can get enough light for each shot without it looking too much like a snapshot. Pretty basic stuff.

do you have rules for your behavior during sessions? if so, what are some of them?

I try to keep each shoot as professional as possible – no rude comments, no touching, etc. I keep good records and releases and pay the models. This is my job so I treat it like one.

are scenes for the photos sometimes inspired by the model; do you occasionally end up with a image you never expected?

Some of the photos are definitely defined by the model. I usually have a general shot list that I want to shoot – how the model responds to my instructions determines the result. Yes, I often plan to shoot one thing but find out that the best shot was something I didn’t plan.

any interest in making more movies?

I still shoot video for short films. I’d love to make a feature but I’d be afraid that I’d spend 2 years working on it, then find out I’d wasted my time because it sucked. When I waste my time shooting someone I’m not financially devastated.

occasionally i see adverts that read very richard kern, do you sometimes feel like corporate advertising, or the designers and photographers who work for them, has ripped off your style? From what I’ve learned doing commercial work, it’s possible that what you are suggesting has happened. I know that some of the best fashion stories I’ve done were the result of an art director or stylist giving me a bunch of swipe (art dept. slang for inspirational material) to copy. I borrow material from many visual sources myself. Looking at the photos in this show, I can immediately see 4 ideas that i lifted.