Richard Kern “New York Girls Revisited”

Marlborough Broome Street is pleased to present New York Girls Revisited an exhibition of photographs and a video by Richard Kern. This show marks both the 20th anniversary of the eponymous book and the artist’s first exhibition with the legendary gallery Feature, Inc.

With Taschen Books set to reissue New York Girls, and the late great Feature proprietor Hudson so sadly departed, this exhibition is conceived in homage to that moment and includes alternate images and outtakes from the 1995 presentations. The outtakes, along with the video, provide a glimpse inside Kern’s process and puncture some of the theatricality of the images selected for the original pressing of the book.

This exhibition is also an opportunity to reflect on cultural change in the last two decades, and the shifting sands of the sexually provocative in art and popular culture. The erotic jolt provided by images of nudity and sexual fetishism may have been blunted by the proliferation of this imagery online, but this has had the interesting effect of forcing a viewer to contend with Kern’s images in more formal, classical photographic terms. What we find, then, is his particular use of composition, lighting, color gels, poses, props and settings. Shot mostly in his East Village walk up, the images open up a psychological terrain of personal fixations (enacted in the high-wire-walk of collaboration with his models) and a meticulous, fastidious drive to create images that telegraph these very specific desires.