terry richardson Archives - Bedford + Bowery

Richard Kern Revisits New York Girls, Feels ‘a Little Pervy Now’

November 19, 2015 By Nicole Disser

Amy With Cigarette, 1993 photo by Richard Kern (Courtesy of the Artist and Marlborough Broome Street, NY)

To honor the 20th anniversary of New York Girls and the re-release of Richard Kern‘s first book, the East Village photographer and Cinema of Transgression filmmaker is running two concurrent gallery shows– one is in Chelsea and the second opens tonight at Marlborough Broome on the Lower East Side. I stopped by the gallery yesterday to check out the photos and speak with Kern.

“It was so long ago, almost seems like somebody else did it,” he laughed. “It was definitely a different time period.” When I arrived, I found Kern sitting quietly at the front desk. I was late but, as he explained later, I’d given him a chance to catch up on Instagram.

Richard Kern Says Fellow Nudie Photog Terry Richardson Was ‘Asking For It’

Philip Glass isn’t the only East Village fixture with new work out. Novelist Porochista Khakpour, a onetime East Villager herself, sits down with Richard Kern, who still keeps an apartment in the nabe, to talk about his new book and Thurston Moore-soundtracked DVD, Shot By Kern. The conversation (interspersed with Kern’s NSFW photos) clears up the myth that “Alphabet City girls” come to his door at all hours asking to model naked, and touches on Kern’s current case of photographer’s block (“if it’s just pretty girls, I don’t even know what a shot is anymore”).
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