Contact High

This book harkens back to the halcyon days of photographer and filmmaker Richard Kern’s youth. Edited by Jesse Pearson, editor of Nudity Today and Apology Magazine, Contact High couldn’t have a simpler premise--it’s all about naked girls smoking weed. This cheeky and playful collection of portraits recalls a time in Kern’s life when, he says, “I spent a lot of time with my friends smoking pot, listening to music, running around in the woods and sometimes swimming naked. Back then, when I was around a naked girl, weed was either about to be smoked or had been smoked.” In 1999, Kern met a model in Los Angeles who reminded him of the girls he used to smoke with back in North Carolina. So, seizing the moment, he “went down to Charleston to shoot her at her house and in the swamps around there. Her ambition at 18 years old was to open a head shop. She had a small gro-lite farm in her bedroom.” This carefree and sexy series of images from 1999 to the present is charged with an atmosphere of freewheeling, optimistic hedonism. Readers will undoubtedly get a real buzz from the beauty and sensuality of the images--perhaps tinged with a bittersweet hint of nostalgia for the sexy abandon of their own carefree youth.