Richard Kern: Polaroids
Published by APE (Art Paper Editions) in September 2025. First edition, second printing. Paperback, 176 pages, 22 × 30 cm. Design and editing by Jurgen Maelfeyt. ISBN 9789464660630.
Richard Kern is a New York-based photographer and filmmaker whose practice spans underground film, editorial work, and artist publications. Working since the early 1980s, he is known for a direct, unadorned approach to portraiture — one that presses on the psychological space between sitter, photographer, and viewer. The work is dry and matter-of-fact, and it is that flatness which makes it unsettling: it holds up the claim of photographic truth to scrutiny while engaging, without ceremony, with the body and received taxonomies around sexual representation.
This volume gathers more than 200 polaroids drawn from multiple projects spanning 35 years. The format is well-suited to the practice — immediate, fixed, unrepeatable — and Maelfeyt's editorial sequencing holds the accumulation in tension without resolving it into something tidier than it is.
A companion title, Grey Cards, is also available, as is Baron. Further titles are listed in our Photography & Photobooks collection.
Richard Kern
Richard Kern is a New York-based photographer and filmmaker. Working across photography and moving image since the early 1980s, he is known for a direct, unadorned approach to portraiture that engages with psychological tension, the body, and the constructed nature of photographic truth. His practice spans underground film, editorial work, and artist publications. Polaroids is among his titles published by APE (Art Paper Editions).
