This interview was conducted on January 16th, 2020 upon the release of Kern’s book Medicated. This is the first publication of the interview.

This FRIDAY, MAY 27th, there will be a free retrospective of five of Richard Kern’s shorts playing at Bella Ciao (145 Mulberry Street) at 7:30PM. There will be a Q&A with Kern and Sean Price Williams following the screening. The event is presented by Cinestra Collective.

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Richard Kern is known primarily for his photographs—you’ve seen one even if you think you haven’t. But photography is only one layer in a winding artist's biography tied to underground scenes of cultural subversion. Back in the mid-80s, Kern was part of a movement in Lower Manhattan whose constituents were pissed. They decided to make art films that reflected their contempt of the way the mass media and politics represented and mistreated them. This movement was the Cinema of Transgression. After working with Lydia Lunch and directing Sonic Youth videos, Kern began taking photos in the early 90s. Most of his work has consisted of young people, drugs, nudity or sex – he even did some porno movies to support himself while transitioning to photography full-time. Since then he became committed to the photographic medium and published 18 photo books.

Kern’s pictures are confrontational and many escape any didactic interpretation. They reveal an underbelly of darkness and many times the reflection turns inward; an audience member must confront questions of representation, perversion, and beauty. In December 2020, he published his most recent book, Medicated, a collection of photographs and interviews compiled over the course of 10 years, inspecting the relationship between young women and prescription drug use. I sat down with Richard Kern and talked to him about it.

In the interview Kern and I discuss photos from his years making films and shooting photos in the 80s all the way to the present. As I conducted I found a man whose purpose superseded a certain moniker of transgression for transgression sake.

These portraits style themselves with a certain immediacy that comes from their direct address with the lens/viewer but require a certain mediation in viewing them. For instance, Medicated features women and their pharmaceuticals in bathrooms and bedrooms. It is vital to view Kern’s work through the lens of narrativity and motivation. Why these spaces? What signs and signifiers do the objects of the background reveal about the subject? Why allow yourself to be photographed in these spaces?

Photo from *Medicated*, courtesy of Kern.

Transcript (edited for clarity and length):

CK: How and when did the idea for Medicated come to you?

RK: When I was shooting in Toronto, I had hired this assistant, and I had another assistant with me, and she had mentioned that, “He does a lot of Adderall,” and I said, “What are you talking about?” And she said, cause I had quit drugs in 1988, or something. So I hadn’t kept up with all that stuff and anyways, she says, “He’s on Adderall, and I took two this morning by accident and I’m really nervous and jittery.” And I said, “Do lots of people take this shit?”

These things, these drugs—I’m going to try not to curse.

And she said “Yes”, and I said, “That would be a really good photo series.”

And I shot her in her bathroom holding her pills, so that was the first photograph of the Medicated project.

And my assistant was the one who told me this, and in the Medicated book, she’s the only one who’s got her eyes closed. It’s that woman. And I thought this would be a good series because it combines all this stuff I like to do things about, which is drugs and sex and all that stuff.

CK: What was your idea for the text never corresponding with the images in the book?

RK: That was more necessity than an idea because I tried matching the text with people, but I didn’t have text for all of those photos. But, I did have a lot of text. There was a lot of text I didn’t use, so we used an amount, and we blew it up an amount that it would just scroll to go along with it. It kind of fits the mood for when you’re medicated. You can just start reading anywhere and it’s all the same stuff over and over again. I did find that several of the women really want to talk about the medication. Being on medication. They don’t have anybody to talk to about it. They go to a doctor and the doctor tells them, “You need to be on medication.” Or they talk to their parents and they say, “We’re going to put you on medication.”

One of the big things about medication is that somebody is telling you, a doctor, a person who is an authority, this goes along with this COVID shit too, a doctor, a person of authority, tells you there is something wrong with you. “You have something wrong with you, so therefore you should take this.” These are people, one of them was talking about that she was 12 years old when she started. That’s a heavy thing to lay on somebody. Also, when you say to someone, “You’re bipolar,” you go, “Oh shit, I’m really fucked up.” It can be a self-fulfilling prophecy almost, but a lot of the medications is really doctors or parents not wanting to deal with it, because at a certain age, it is normal to go through anxiety and stuff…It’s screwy; it’s interesting.

CK: Throughout the book, you are never someone who’s either glamorizing or moralizing the culture, you just show it for what it is. Was that what you wanted? To give these women a voice?

RK: (Laughing) I was selfish. Strictly selfish motives. It ticked all of the boxes of stuff that I’m interested in. There’s always been an issue for me of, “Why does this girl not have clothes on?” So… I could put them in a bathroom and they could, conceivably, not have as many clothes on. In the bathroom, they could be holding their medication, which a lot of the time was where they actually kept it. It could be right on the line of creepy and seeing something that’s supposed to be hot, I don’t know if hot is the right word, but it’s creepy instead.

And it’s creepy in a different way. Not, like, creepy that you are looking at a naked girl, but you’re seeing someone with medication and the fact that this young person is on medication is doubly creepy. It’s not on [the women], but on the fact that society is set up so that they are on medication already. Like, they didn’t have to start smoking pot when they were ten and then drinking booze and then all of this stuff. It's the same thing with, like, vaccinations with children. It’s like they give them, I don’t know, like a million vaccines to a little baby whose immune system isn’t even developed yet and they just shoot all this stuff into them. It’s interesting in that way. I did make a mistake though. It was a different time. What I should have done is – and what would have made it perfect is – if I had guys in there too. That would make it perfect. There’s a lot of Spanish girls in it and some Asian girls, but I didn’t find that many African-Americans, that were on medication. I didn’t find any [who took medication]. I assume they are, but I don’t know. It’s mostly like a white thing it seemed to me. It really seemed like a white thing. Also, I tried to shoot as much as possible in the person’s bathroom or bedroom. I also felt, like, if they were about to get into bed, they could have their pills and their bed would be there. And they could also have fewer clothes on.

CK: It’s interesting you are thinking in narrativity, or in terms of cause and effect.

RK: Yeah. I’ve felt that for years. I’ve shot a million naked girls just standing there or laying in bed or whatever. In bed, they can also be justified with having less clothes on. I have this debate with some artist friends of mine who say, “No, a beautiful nude is a beautiful thing.” That didn’t fly for me in the 90s even, but then I went through a period shooting porn for money and it was just like all that went out the window. When you’re shooting porn, you are shooting a very specific thing. They are supposed to be naked, there is supposed to be no meaning, it serves one purpose. There’s also a narrative of what’s in the bathroom or what’s in the background. You can pick up details about a person’s life about the products they use, things like that. I was just trying to add more information in there.

CK: It’s a very limited look into a life. It reminds me of something you said earlier about it being “creepy and hot,” but I would also add “personal.”

RK: Yeah.

CK: Would you say that this drug culture now is an aberration with drug use in youth culture from [your own youth]?

RK: Yes. A big difference is that I wouldn’t go to a doctor and he would say, “You need to take some speed *laughing* or you need to take a Quaalude or you need to do some heroin.” Even my son when he was four or five, my doctor, who I thought was an alternative doctor, said, “We should put your son on Adderall when he starts school.” I’m like, “What?” He said, “It’s really competitive; in New York City schools, it’s so competitive, they really need to be able to focus.” I’m like, “Jesus Christ,” and switched doctors. That’s the kind of thing they encourage. That’s the difference.

…If you watch a football game, it’s hilarious, the erectile dysfunction ads, arthritis ads, all these different ads for drugs. I’m at an age where every time I go to the doctor they are telling me I need this other kind of drug, and then I read about it and it’s just like holy shit, the side effects for this stuff are so scary. No way am I taking it. I think there’s a difference now that the doctors are the drug pushers and the enterprising street dealers are locked up. And they make their real pushers into Anthony Fauci and superheroes and let them throw out the first pitch at a Mets game.

CK: They aren’t even embarrassed about the profit motive anymore.

RK: It’s all under the guise of, like, they do a war under the guise of patriotism, but it’s actually... I mean the whole Iraq war. You’re young enough to remember that. It was bad. But nothing we can do about it.

CK: There were millions of protesters but it didn’t do anything.

RK: Right. Well it got them on a list.

CK: Now you get to be listened to… *laughing*

RK: Another question... *laughing*

CK: Anyway, you’ve displayed Medicated in three different mediums: the exhibition, the documentary, and the photo book. Have you seen different responses to each medium?

RK: Well, I have to admit, in the book, it’s more pure interest. I was able to do that now. Whenever cancel culture and MeToo, I think I’m canceled by the way. Whenever all that started, I’m old, I’m white, I’m shooting young women. So it just became un-PC. It is un-PC. That’s why I’ve slacked off shooting. It’s like what am I doing. I had to look at it. In the documentary I didn’t put any type of nudity. Did you watch it?

CK: Yeah. Well there’s one time when she’s in the shower.

RK: Well, you don’t see anything, do you?

CK: You can see some of her nipples… When she bends down.

RK: Oh shit. *chuckling* I thought I had everything out.

CK: That part was the most interesting part because I could see the style there regardless.

RK: Well, I tried to make it without nudity, but I guess I slipped up there. But again, I could have shot guys. Because there are guys on medication, and I tried to get more people of color. For one thing, I don’t get many people of color asking to model, although there are a lot of Spanish girls in that book. I don’t know how it’s all set up these days. The response to that was good. When I did the exhibition, here in New York, the film was playing in the front of the gallery on a TV set and some of the Medicated shots were on one side and across were some of Doubles. And then coming into the gallery there was this giant blow-up of this girl smoking pot. This is what you’d see because of all those weird drug visions and then, on the other side, were the actual pills. There’s that whole pot series [CONTACT HIGH].

Photo from Kerns’ *Doubles* series, courtesy of Kern.

There’s this whole part of art, but I’m not claiming to be an artist, where people do stuff all about desire, or things you can’t have, or things you yearn for. And a lot of my stuff is looking at stuff from my youth. And those Doubles shots were schoolbook pictures, they were school portraits just laid on top of each other, one nude and one clothed one. A lot of my stuff has been the same ever since I started, the same threads go all the way through everything. Whether there’s drugs and sex and youth.

CK: There is a thread of voyeurism that has guided your work throughout, yet you also take a lot of portraits. It felt like in Medicated you bridged that gap between the two. Did this project feel any different because you are dealing with reality?

RK: For me, like I was saying, it felt like this is perfect. It’s got everything in it. They can be in a bathroom, they have a reason to be without many clothes on, it has some drug aspect. It just had everything. You’re looking, but it’s different. These days, no way I could have a show with just naked people. Unless I put men in there, and nobody is doing anything sexual, there’s nothing even remotely like a come on. In a gallery, no way anybody’s going to let me show anything, maybe in Europe, but not here, for sure. But in the old days, in the 90s, the New York Girls stuff and soft colored gels and shit where it’s all pretty, and then the Model Release period where I’d show a girl doing eye drops or eating or whatever. When you’d walk into a gallery, first you’re confronted with, “There are naked girls,” which would immediately throw up a wall for 90% of the people. With Medicated, you walk in and there’s “that problem,” but there’s a bunch of other problems on top of that. It was confrontational. All my stuff has been pretty confrontational. Just showing a nude girl is a really cheap trick. Mapplethorpe did it with showing a big black dick. All that shit’s being reevaluated too.

…Cutter is another perfect [project], like Medicated. When I was talking about what type of girl is really writing to model. It was before the internet as it exists now. She wrote me and said, “I want to model for you.” She sent a few pictures of herself, and she’s not somebody I would ordinarily shoot because she looked pretty unhealthy, and she lived in Japan. And then I would write like, “It would be great to shoot you, but I’m here in New York and you’re in Japan.” Then, she showed up two days later at my door. She had a whole bag of pharmaceuticals. She took tons of roofies and all these other drugs. And she’s covered, and I mean literally covered, with cut marks. So, I set up a camera where I’m sitting and I just interviewed her for ten minutes, right off the top of my head, and it was another [project] that was so brutal and so real, but I didn’t know it was going to happen. It was so hard for me to watch. It made me so uneasy. It took me ten years before I could even look at it again and even edit it. I’m building it up…

CK: In the book, the interview sections seem to have a lot of common threads from person to person. I noticed that many people talked about the popularity and openness with prescription drug usage in school settings, but then never being able to talk about the negative aspects of use. So do you think the taboo nature is what leads to the negativity?

RK: I don’t even know if it’s like that anymore either. In five years time it could change. Since I did all of these interviews, I don’t know. Most of the women I’ve shot in the last couple years have said they’ve got off all medication. And there are some I wonder if they stayed off of them. Or if they actually ever got off because they describe going off the medication makes you crazier than being on them. When I was doing those interviews, Xanax was not as big as it became. I don’t know if it is…

CK: It is, unfortunately. I know some terrible stories about Xanax.

RK: Yeah. It’s another one that’s a doctor one and a countercultural one where it has its own underground economy.

CK: That’s interesting that there is some sort of countercultural aspect of these drugs, but I also think that your transgressiveness is working in the same countercultural way. Would you say you are still working in that countercultural or transgressive framework?

RK: That’s a good question. I think about it quite a bit. I’m 66 now. I’m trying to slack off and just deal with stuff I already did. I shot several documentaries I never finished and a lot of short themed movies I never finished, but it's a completely different environment now. If I went against the establishment now, it’s not like the counterculture when I was young, and you were like, “Fuck the government, man. Get out of the war.” Now it’s like, “You’re an old white guy, sexist pig, manipulating and exploiting young women.” And I go, “Maybe I am.” It’s a different kind of counterculture. Counterculture now is different than it was back then. There’s more than one culture to be counter to now.

…I come from a time when anarchy was popular. It was like, “Let’s tear everything down and rebuild it.” Unfortunately, what got torn down was...well really this is getting too philosophical, but really my whole thing in the beginning was to fuck up people’s view of sex and romance and things like that. That was more where I felt conflicted. Especially, how everything seemed to be run by sex and the relationships that were shown in the media and what we were told to expect. They had nothing to do with what it was really like to be in some relationship if you were a slightly messed up person. And mine was the just-fuck-up-people’s-heads. There were these movies like Submit to Me and Submit to Me Now, those were made when LSD was making a comeback in the 80s and there would be these acid parties at clubs where everyone would do acid or mushrooms or whatever. I made those movies just to show people on acid.

CK: What did the models think about the work when it came out?

RK: It’s funny because VICE did a story and back then, the fucking guy who wrote the thing wrote, “Kern likes his models medicated and naked.” Then, this feminist mag jumped on it and wrote this whole thing about me exploiting all these women. Then, they asked me if I wanted to comment, so I told them, “I’m not commenting, but why don’t you talk to all the women who are referred to in this article?” So, I gave them all the emails and then they came back and printed a retraction. I couldn’t believe it because most of the women told them they were really happy to tell somebody what it was like and they were happy to have this voice to explain what it was like.

That can be a really dark place in your head, and if you’re not aware of AA or aren’t a part of that network, you have no idea what’s going on. And you need someone to bounce off. They were all unanimously happy about it. I’m thinking of any bad reactions that could be had. The only reaction that could be bad, but I haven’t heard is that a lot of times, which is an issue I deal with now, more than before is somebody when they are 19 or 20 wanting to model, then five years later they say, “I was going through a bad time, could you quit using those photos?” And I’ll say sure. That’s the only issue that could be a problem is somebody changing their mind. There is somebody I’m supposed to shoot next week and all those issues are already in my head about this particular person because I know they are 19. Usually when I used to shoot all the time, I’d set up a meeting with a model beforehand and I’d talk to them about all this stuff we’d shoot. And only if they were fine with everything then I’d go ahead, but still, you can say all that when you’re 19 or 20 or 21, even 30, and still change your mind later.

CK: Throughout your work, you’re capturing a moment in time…

RK: That’s a photograph. *laughing*

CK: Cultural point in time. How do you hope Medicated is viewed in futurity?

RK: I can’t say how it’s going to be looked out, but I’ve seen a couple of things on Netflix, a movie called Medication, where they did the exact same thing I did. All of this work, not just Medicated, all of it, it always looks better in 20 years. What’s fun is the people who bought one of the thousand books and they’ll have the books. I’ve been getting rid of a lot of my archive and it’s surprising what particular books can become worth down the line. You never know which ones they are going to be. I had lost faith in the book format but I knew with the book form, it’s not as easy to attack me for it. Since it’s just out there.

…Also, time tends to take the rough edges of the controversial part of it. It’s easier to look back at my stuff from New York Girls and just see it as nostalgia instead of naked girls being exploited.

CK: I’ve even seen some articles about you being reevaluated as feminist.

RK: I would say I am.

CK: In this book, it seems like that’s the point. Letting the women tell their stories.

RK: Well, it depends on who you’re asking also. Someone wrote on my Instagram the other day, “conventionally attractive women in their underwear, how boring,” but that person probably doesn’t know I’ve been doing it for 40 years in one form or another, they just see it on Instagram and that’s their immediate response. Instagram is crowded with that stuff, it is everywhere. The other thing I was going to say was; Do you know Degas or Balthus?

CK: Yes.

RK: Or even Picasso. And I’m not comparing myself to these people. But Degas did the little dancers and paintings of dancers. I didn’t know all this until recently, but the whole dance scene at that time in France was financed by these rich guys, and you can see these guys lurking around the curtains in some of them and they basically paid and could have sex with the girls. That was the exchange. That was how it was financed. I was just like, “What?” Also, with the young dancers which is pedophilia, but I never thought of it in that way. I never thought, “This is pedophilia.” Instead, I always thought this was a really beautiful image of a young dancer. A lot of that stuff, time loosens its restrictions. Think of Sally Mann, she was photographing her kids naked and the roof fell in on her. Then, there’s that whole other culture of people who don’t see her that way. This reevaluation culture sees her that way.