“From my first sketches, I start a process: I add and remove layers, I polish an idea to perfection. I like to reflect on the light I choose for a certain image, the emotion it represents and arouses. Time is at the heart of my work. Ideally, I like to leave my pictures aside for a few days before editing them,” says Nicolas Kern. The 35-year-old photographer left his native Austria for New York in the 2000s to become Annie Leibovitz‘s assistant. “I wanted to learn everything about the medium, so that technique would become second nature and would not hinder my creativity,” he recalls. Today he develops a body of work influenced by the aesthetics of fashion and painting, where bodies and objects blend together to create an elegant and textured whole. His greatest source of inspiration? Patina – a deposit that gradually forms on objects and transforms colours over time. “Whether it’s on faces, objects or places, it tells our story: who we are and where we come from,” adds the artist.
© Nicolas Kern
