Richard Kern and the Arithmetic of Desire

Richard Kern has been pointing a camera at women in states of undress for thirty years and calling it art, which it is—more or less, depending on how generous you’re feeling that afternoon. Face to Panty Ratio collects his signature work: close quarters, available light, domestic interiors, the kind of images that feel less like fashion shoots and more like someone’s actual Saturday. He came up through the New York underground with Lydia Lunch and Nick Zedd, and that No Wave DNA is still visible in the way he frames a body—confrontational but not hostile, explicit but never quite pornographic. The eroticism in his photographs occupies the narrow strip of territory where desire meets documentary, and he’s been working that strip for decades without appearing to get bored of it.