Extra High

Extra High is Richard Kern's follow-up to Contact High, a smaller-format booklet of women smoking weed. It mixes new smoker portraits with outtakes from the Contact High sessions, printed at the same unfussy, snapshot scale that runs through Kern's zine work.

Published by Innen in Zurich in an edition of 1,000, the booklet keeps Kern's format from the Contact High series: direct, close-up portraits with none of the staging of his earlier fetish and horror-film work. The subjects look straight at the camera, cigarette or joint in hand, in a series that treats a familiar vice as just another kind of portrait sitting.

Kern has worked in downtown New York since the early 1980s, moving from the Cinema of Transgression films he made with Nick Zedd and others to the photography, mostly women, mostly candid, that has defined his career since the 1990s. Innen's small run of zines, including Extra High and its companion Bed Bath and Beyond, extends that same low-key, high-volume approach into self-published print.