The Richard Kern Inventory

Richard Kern has been photographing women and pills and the space between them since the early 1980s New York underground—first as a No Wave filmmaker, then as a photographer who has, across four decades, refined a very specific aesthetic. You know his pictures when you see them: a woman, a bed or a floor, natural or minimal artificial light, and almost always something pharmaceutical in frame. The rawness never quite tips into fashion or pornography but borrows freely from both. "Girls with medications" describes roughly half his catalog, which is either a statement about contemporary women’s relationship to their own bodies or just a recurring prop that photographs well—and he’s never been particularly interested in resolving that ambiguity for you.