Nicole with meat and other works  
Richard Kern

  

 

Kern had his epiphany one day while cutting class in 10th grade. "I was hitchhiking to a mall 30 miles away when this beat-up old car full of young N.Y.C. glam girls stopped for me. They had weird haircuts, vinyl hot pants and platform shoes. I sat there in the back seat with my mouth hanging open, like the hick I was."

Challenging every norm of beauty and even pornography Kern ‘s girls are scruffy, disabused and cynically impertinent. Typically, they study at Parsons or the New School, read Foucault and Bukowski, listen to techno and shave only when they feel like it.

One unglamorous young woman brushes her teeth, another flosses, a third stands stupidly with her finger in her nose. There's a moral element to Kern's work. The overwhelming message seems to be that freedom is good, whether it's the freedom of a photographer to expose his obsessions, of a sister to expose her body or of viewers to indulge their fantasies.

This is the freedom those women in hot pants incarnated for Kern all those years ago. For the kids of small-town America, it's the freedom that has always made New York the center of their desires and the most amazing place in the world.

The New York Post