Bed Bath and Beyond

Bed Bath and Beyond is Richard Kern's zine of women photographed in bedrooms and bathrooms. Innen first published it in 2015 and reprinted it as a 500-copy second edition, on yellow paper, through Innen Books in Zurich in November 2021.

Like Kern's other Innen booklets, it sticks to his working method of the past two decades. The portraits look unstaged and close, shot in the domestic spaces where he actually works rather than in a studio. The title plays off the defunct American big-box retailer, a flat joke set against pictures that are anything but retail-glossy.

Kern has photographed women in New York apartments since the early 1990s, after moving from the confrontational, low-budget films of the Cinema of Transgression into still photography. Innen's run of his zines, Extra High, Bed Bath and Beyond, and others, are cheap, fast, small-run counterparts to the hardcover monographs, Model Release and New York Girls among them, that collect the same body of work.