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 straight from camera, unedited and raw.
The grey card, a neutral reference tool used in photography to calibrate exposure and colour, functions here as both subject and formal device. Kern turns the utilitarian object into a vehicle for examining 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 within the broader context of contemporary Photography & Photobooks that treat the printed form as an extension of the photographic work rather than its container.
