RENTAL is proud to present Richard Kern: Photos 1980-1999, a retrospective of the artist’s photographic work. Richard Kern, photographer, occasional pornographer, former-filmmaker and video director, and a man once amicably referred to as the ‘Evil Cameraman’, remains, first and foremost, a portrait artist. For more than two decades Kern has – with a shifting band of accomplices that, over the years, has included post-punk diva Lydia Lunch, artists such as David Wojnarowicz, Karen Finley, Rita Ackermann and Lucy McKenzie, the novelist Geoff Nicholson, and musicians such as Sonic Youth, the Butthole Surfers and Marilyn Manson – sought to both unravel and illuminate the complex and often darker sides of human nature.

Born in 1954, Richard Kern has lived and worked in New York City since 1979. In the eighties, he produced a series of short films that now are recognized as the central works of the movement now known as the Cinema of Transgression. In the 90’s he switched to photography full time and occasionally directed music videos for bands like Sonic Youth and Marilyn Manson. Kern has published nine books and is a regular contributor to a variety of international publications, and exhibiting his photographs in galleries internationally.