R. J. Kern

R. J. Kern (born 1978) is an American artist, known for his photographs exploring identity, culture, and philosophical questions about nature and heritage through the interaction of people, animals and landscape.

[11][12] In 2018, Kehrer Verlag published Kern's monograph, The Sheep and the Goats,[13] which features a conversation with noted photographer Stuart Klipper[14] and was named one of "The Most Beautiful German Books 2018" by design foundation Stiftung Buchkunst.

Kern's work focuses on the intimate, interdependent relationships of people, animals and landscape, exploring nature as a device for understanding ancestry, identity, myth, and history.

[27][28][1][3] He has been strongly influenced by 19th-century painters such as Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Sidney Cooper, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, well as by Pictorialist photography.

"[27] Assessing images such as Dumb and Dumber, Freeborn County, Minnesota, USA (2016), Elly Thomas of World Photography Organisation identified their unique perspective on the contemporary meaning of pastoral.

"[18] The series consists of over 65 portraits of handlers and their animals that weren't champions at ten Minnesota county fairs, stylized and made formal by a studio-style backdrop.

[24][12] Reviewers in the Boston Globe and Lenscratch wrote that images, such as Kenzi and Hootie, Anoka County Fair, Minnesota, 2016, "pull at the heartstrings,"[18] capturing both subjects with dignity, respect and mutuality, but not sentimentality.

"[33] Other critics, such as The Telegraph's Hettie Judah, suggested that they touched on the ethics of breeding and the human ability to imagine itself separate from the natural world,[2] or "the dwindling lifeways of small, family-owned farms" and human-animal bonds.

His series "The Best of the Best" showcased pairs of 2018 prizewinners (including livestock, bunnies, geese) in an exhibition concurrent with the 2019 fair; curator Deborah Ultan described them as "significant portraits, almost like archetypes” that bridge the history of photography with the present.