Richard Kern, Soap and Skin

Richard Kern has been photographing women in states of undress and domestic exposure since the early 1980s, and the work has always occupied a strange middle ground between voyeurism and intimacy—sometimes both in the same frame. His girls washing are exactly what you’d expect and slightly not: unglamorous light, tiles, water, the ordinary ritual of a body cleaning itself, shot with an attention that makes it feel simultaneously observed and consented to. Whether it actually is has always been part of the conversation around his work. The images are beautiful and faintly uncomfortable, which is almost certainly the intended effect.