ARCHIVAL GIRLS

RICHARD KERN, vice.com

EMILY

2000
“This is really great because it’s got videotapes in it, and the little TV that has the video recorder. It looks so old.”

MEL 1999“She’s a French girl who I shot a million times. She didn’t care about being in porn magazines, which was great because I could sell the photos anywhere.”

SAM 

1994“This was in San Francisco. Barely Legal magazine had just started, and I had just sold my first set to them. I went to San Francisco looking for girls, and this one said she would do it. I imagine she was a stripper because everybody I knew there was in the stripper scene. She had a kid, although the kid was nowhere to be seen. I guess she was about 18 or 19 in this photo.”

I FORGOT HER NAME 

1995“This was another stripper from San Francisco. I don’t remember anything about her… Oh, wait. I do! My doctor at the time told me his marriage was breaking up. It turned out it was because he was having an affair with this girl I photographed. Total coincidence.”

JAIKO 

1993“I still see Jaiko all the time and she still looks really hot. I think she was about 19 here. I met her and shot her when she was just visiting New York from Japan, and then she moved here. She is an A-number-1 girl. She has these incredible boobs.”

What I find so appealing about the photographs of RICHARD KERN is the simplicity of composition being mainly a woman as the focal point, however Kern's photographs can be so very easily miss construed. 
Kern's collection for Vice magazine 'ARCHIVAL GIRLS' is an example of how his photography technique tells a story, the little blurbs under the images allow the viewer to develop a relationship with the image and subject as well as having an educated opinion on the piece, in turn this allows the individual to view the work in a different light. Kern instills an approachability in his work.