Grey Cards – Richard Kern
Grey Cards by Richard Kern is a 252-page first-edition photobook published in a limited run of 500 copies by Friend Editions. The book gathers Kern's grey card photographs — images presented exactly as they came out of the camera, unedited and raw.
The grey card, a neutral reference tool used in photography to calibrate exposure and colour, becomes here both subject and formal device. Kern turns the utilitarian object into a vehicle for interrogating what photography records and what it withholds. The 252 pages move between candid and posed images without hierarchy, sustaining a tension that resists easy resolution. The question of truth and objectivity in photography runs through the work not as argument but as persistent condition.
The physical object reflects the same economy. Softcover, with a Colorplan grey stock cover and a tipped-in grey card, the book's material choices are consistent with its content — restrained, deliberate, without embellishment. It sits comfortably within the broader context of contemporary Photobooks that treat the printed form as an extension of the photographic work rather than its container.
Condition: Shrink-wrap has been removed. The book itself is in excellent, like-new condition.
About Richard Kern
Richard Kern is a New York-based photographer and filmmaker whose work has consistently engaged with the psychological and darker aspects of human nature. Over more than two decades, his practice has examined the space between subject, photographer, and viewer — across both still and moving image.
His photographs and films have been exhibited at MoMA and The Whitney Museum, and in over 50 solo shows worldwide. Kern is a regular contributor to Interview, Vice, Dazed, and Purple, and has published 34 books to date. Richard Kern titles available at Lokator100 span multiple periods and formats of his published work.
