Kern’s Girls Without the Flattery

Richard Kern has never been interested in the flattering angle. His work—shot in apartments, on unmade beds, in the kind of light that registers everything—has always operated at the blunt end of photography: bodies presented without the softening that most editorial work considers mandatory. His series of pregnant women fits this logic exactly. Pregnancy is either aestheticized into something luminous and symbolic or hidden altogether; Kern does neither. The women he photographs are simply there, changed in a way the camera records without editorializing. It’s the same unflinching eye he’s turned on everything else, and the results are the same—uncomfortable, specific, impossible to look away from.