For the seventh instalment of Baron, Richard Kern turns his lens toward the threshold between girlhood and womanhood — a territory defined by ambiguity, transition, and competing social pressures. The subjects contact Kern themselves; he does not cast, direct, or pose them. They determine how they appear, whether clothed or nude, and retain control over how their bodies are represented. The resulting images are, in that sense, collaborations: the photographer provides the frame, the subject fills it on her own terms.
That arrangement does not resolve the questions it raises. Kern is an older man; his subjects are young women. The photographs are shaped by the male gaze even as they stage an assertion of female agency. What remains open — and what gives the work its tension — is whether that agency is freely expressed or conditioned by the same cultural scripts it appears to resist. The layered, translucent quality of the images reinforces this ambivalence: bodies veiled and unveiled simultaneously, identities neither fully formed nor fully withheld.
Published by Baron in 2021, the book sits within a broader body of work that includes Kern's New York Girls (1997) and Medicated (2020). It is part of his sustained inquiry into how girlhood is constructed, performed, and photographed. Art direction by Sam Boxer. Browse the full Photography & Photobooks catalogue, or explore titles on the body and representation in the Body: Desire, Form & Performance collection. Further work by Kern is available at Lokator100: Grey Cards and Polaroids.
