Richard Kern had seen a KKK rally and a drowned corpse by the age of six. Since then, he's become a legendary cult film maker and porn photographer, rich with tales of crystal meth, bondage and human candlesticks - and the pictures to prove them...

Who would have thought a self-confessed hick from Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, would one day attain infamy and fortune as a guerilla film-maker, before turning porno photographer. Well, thanks to a run-in with a gaggle of NYC glam chicks who warped his mind and stroked his libido one day when he was bunking off high-school, that's exactly what happened to Richard Kern.

He relocated to the Big Apple and, having got his mitts on a Super-8 movie camera for five bucks, Kern proceeded to make his mark on the burgoning underground art scene.

Via sex'n'drug-infested celluloid shorts like Manhattan Love Suicides, You Killed Me First, Death Valley 69 and Fingered, which starred the dark, depraved, and for the most part nihilistic likes of Lydia Lunch, Lung Leg, Cassandra Stark, Tommy Turner, David Wojnarowicz and Nick Zedd, he became a legendary master of the 'Cinema of Transgression'. He also got totally fucked on drugs.

Eventually ridding himself of his monkey, by the early 1990s Kern was firmly focused on a less harmful vice - sex. In particular, still photos of pornographic landscapes populated by girls, girls and more girls. Few are truly able to say that their life has been a walk on the wildside. Richard Kern can.

I want to go back to when you used to accompany your father when he took photos for the local paper. How old were you and what was the most horrific sight you witnessed?

It must have been from the time I could sit up inside a car. It was a drowning, because I remember pretty vividly going to this lake at night, and they dragged this thing out. I remember seeing the covered body.

I also remember there used to be KKK rallies everywhere. The Klan would be in the middle of the town with the whole fucking thing, crosses burning and all that shit. In the South in the late 1950s, it wasn't like a thing where everybody was shocked or anything, it was probably more like the other way around. I was six, what did I know? I'm wondering if that's what we were there for [so Dad could take photos], but I know he wasn't wearing a robe!

As your movies lean heavily on the viewer as voyeur, can you remember any particular voyeuristic moments from when you were a kid?

Oh, sure man, I was a peeper, but not a heavy peeper. Back in the 1950s and early 1960s, it wasn't like you could go on the internet and see what a naked woman looked like, and where I lived there weren't porno mags all over the place. The only way you were going to see something was through net curtains. The woman next door to us always walked around in her nightgown, and she was young. I used to try and see her through her curtains,because my windows looked straight at hers. There were a lot of influences there, I had a paper round from the time I was in the fifth grade [about 11 years old]. There was a lot of that kind of stuff where the housewife would come to the door with hardly anything on and she'd say, "Would you like to come in?" That was how I got my first exposure to porn mags. There was a customer I had who never paid his bill. His wife always came to the door looking like the Playboy woman with the Martini glass in hand. One time I was going around to the different doors, knocking on them, trying to get paid. I went to their garage and he had stacks and stacks of porn mags and it was like another world.

In your book New York Girls, there's a proliferation of bondage imagery. Is this a display of your preferred sexual activity?

Yes and no. I mean, the people I tied up were mostly people I wasn't having sex with. Well, some of them, maybe. Bondage is a sexual activity without actual sexual intercourse, I guess. People say it's not sex, but it is. I don't care what they say!

Of course it is, and it features, on occasions, in your movies as well

Yeah. That was very thrilling at one point for me. I mean, it's all about power you know.

What about the movie you made with Jap Anne, The Evil Cameraman...

That was a twisted relationship...

Ah, so you were in a relationship with Jap Anne at the time?

Yeah, kinda. She would do it. It's hard to find someone you can say, "Hey, I have a little fantasy I wanna do for a movie" to and to get the desired response of, "OK, sure."

What was even harder was the scene with the blonde girl [Ice Queen] who's strung between the walls. That was fucking hard to do, to lift somebody like that and stretch them across the room [in the movie, Kern ties her feet together, hangs her upside down from a hook , then ties her hands to the opposite wall and leaves her suspended]. I used to shoot a lot of that stuff around the New York Girls time, but I quit for the most part. Once, I was hanging this girl upside down. The rope broke and she just bounced on her head. If she hadn't been about 20 years old, she probably would have broken her neck and died - and that would have been really hard to explain to the police [laughs]. I'd be in jail.

So why the fixation with shooting girls for New York Girls with lit candles in their arses?

It started with the very first shot. It was with this blonde, Erin, who got it stuck in her A-hole when we were messing around, shooting photos. Then somebody suggested it would be a nice series. So I shot some more.

Were your subjects aware they'd be used as human candleholders?

Well, when they got a candle stuck in them they sure were aware of it!

Have you ever employed a casting couch when selecting your subjects?

I didn't ever employ a casting couch, no. I was too shy. I can't even go up to somebody and ask them if they'll model for me, are you kidding?

Well how do you get your girls?

Usually they contact me.

Considering your films and your photos, it's a surprise that you're ostensibly a shy guy

Well, shy in real life, yes, I guess.

So don't you see the photos as real life? Part of your style is that they are so natural, there's no real glamour element to the majority of your work

I mean, it is real, but it just seems like work when you're doing it, a job.

Finally, some artists tend to be at their most creative when they're fucked up on one chemical stimulant or another. How come your work hasn't suffered since you quit?

The whole notion that you're more creative when you're fucked up is an illusion. From my experience, when you quit doing drugs you become a great deal more creative. Your imagination and ability to think is a lot stronger. Once you quit, you realise that most people who are doing drugs are really fucking boring! I was really boring. But you know, if I'd never done acid I imagine I would be a completely different person.

Shit times for Richard kern

In 1987 Kern quit New York for San Francisco in order "to escape my drug life". Things didn't quite pan out as planned. Surrounded by crystal-meth-heads, the film-maker who regards his work as "like taking a big, fat, smelly dump and then standing back and watching people marvel over it", fell in with someone notorious for frequently taking a shit on stage... the (now deceased) king of psycho-scat-punk - GG Allin

Richard Kern: I had photographed GG in New York way back when. I don't even know how I got in touch with him, or how we hooked up but somehow we agreed to do a show and I got together a band of drug addicts that I hung out with. We were called the Drug Wars.

You were getting well fucked up together at that point?

Oh yeah, definitely. GG arrived [at the apartment] and in true San Francisco speed freak fashion... Have you ever done crystal [meth]? It's not like regular Brit speed. It doesn't just get you wired, it takes you off some other place, a bit like tripping out. Then if you just do it for days and days... I would meet people who hadn't slept for like 30 or 40 days, you know?

Tweakers?

Yeah, and you just look at them, and they would look like they were going to kill you. The people I was hanging around doing drugs with in New York were not threatening, scary criminals... but somehow I got involved (LAUGHS) with all these criminals in San Francisco. They were criminal in that they would hold people up and rob them and steal cars and shit like that. It seemed like the whole speed culture was based around stuff like, you would even try to fuck up your best friend. The reason I'm telling you this in connection with GG is that everybody in the band was a speed freak or a speed dealer. I don't think GG had ever done that shit [crystal] before, so we gave him a ton of it when he arrived.

Were they the most fucked up times of your life?

It was like a turning point for me.

The wake-up call?

Yeah. Having been shooting a lot of crystal, I finally went off on a [paranoic] hallucinatory rampage because I thought I was gonna get arrested for selling drugs. I'd taken all these photos of GG totally fucked up. During one show I looked over at him, he'd got a big piece of glass and he just cut right across his face and it opened up. I had pictures of all that kind of shit and I destroyed them all. At that point I left San Francisco, came back to New York and within three days I was in AA.