-- tulsa --
Larry Clark stumbled into the New York art scene in 1971 when he published Tulsa, a limited edition art book featuring documentary photographs of himself and his degenerate friends shot over an eight-year period (1963-1971). Tulsa is a collection of grainy, black and white images taken by Clark in his 20's while hanging out with local teenagers shooting meth-amphetamine, posing with guns, and having sex. Clark has described the scene in simple terms: "We all took a lot of drugs; my friends got into crime, and I was kind of an outlaw back in that period myself..."
When Tulsa first appeared in 1971, the graphic depictions of sex, violence and drug abuse by the youth of Oklahoma were acclaimed by critics for exposing the reality of American suburban life at the fringe and for shattering long-held mythical conventions that drugs and violence were an experience solely indicative of the urban landscape. These raw, sometimes morbid images were taken in three series of shoots in 1963, 1968 and 1971, and reveal a youth culture progressively overwhelmed by self-destruction.
Clark's photographic process was highly documentary, using a 35mm camera with wide angle lens and working with existing light sources rather than strobes or artificial lighting. "Tulsa was straight documentary but it had a fictive quality to it," Clark says. He himself has described how he drank, injected amphetamines, lived off prostitutes, and was arrested for numerous offenses (including various assaults, a knifing, and a shooting). Many of his stark black & white images include self-portraits - but a majority of his work centers on teenage kids, floundering and bored in small-town Oklahoma, tripping in New Mexico, selling themselves on the streets of Manhattan. Consider an image: a self-portrait of Clark backed against a corner, shirtless with wild freak hair, dazed eyes, a tourniquet, dark blood dribbling down his arm. His images focus on eyes and cocks and adolescent skin and guns and needles and fixes. Clark emerges as a Gonzo journalist, but he takes it one step further. His camera zooms in on fixes and fucking. There appear to be no rules or consequences.
-- teenage lust --
Photograph by Larry Clark from the book 1992
copyright Larry Clark, 1992
The law eventually came. With all the speed and smack and weed and acid and quaaludes and hookers and guns and criminals around, it was bound to. Clark spent nineteen months of the late '70s in maximum security in Oklahoma after various convictions....the ones that finally sealed it were shooting someone in the arm (the result of a speed-freak cardgame); being caught driving drunk, again; then being caught with a pistol, after a 'lude-haze eviction squabble turned nasty.'
In the mid-1970s, Clark received an 'Imprimatur of Excellence' grant of $5,000 from the NEA. While the grant money itself went to lawyers to try to keep him out of jail ("So there goes the NEA, thanks a lot," Clark wrote), he managed to finish a book of photographs and publish it in 1983 under the title Teenage Lust. Although his second book fueled by an NEA grant was delayed by a 19 month jail sentence in 1976 for a parole violation, Teenage Lust was considerably more sexual and disturbing than the first; this time depicting teenage runaways. Well into his 30s, Clark continued to spend time with 15-year-olds, photographing them as they took drugs, had sex, and prostituted themselves. Clark's photographs show, among other things, teenagers having sex in the back seat of a car, a close-up of a prostitute performing oral sex on a teenager. Another, a teenage boy in a fedora hat fucking a wild-eyed, splayed nowheregirl on a single bed with a mirror-head as another man waits his turn, erect cock in hand. A hand-scrawled caption. "...They met a girl on acid in Bryant Park at 6am and took her home. 1980...." A picture captioned "brother and sister" shows a naked boy with an erection pointing a gun at a naked, tied-up girl. Several photographs include Clark, naked along with the teenagers. As America's black angel of pioneering hyper-real photography depicting the sleaze and squalor of the unfettered culture of youth in Tulsa and Teenage Lust, Clark's merciless and grimly poignant books quickly became sought-after. You're doing well if you have a copy of either limited edition collection.
-- 1992 --
Photograph by Larry Clark from the book 1992
copyright Larry Clark, 1992
It is a measure of the chasm that has grown up between mainstream society and the art world that in every part of the country selling Larry Clark's NEA-sponsored book of photographs could land you in jail, but in galleries here and around the globe, he has for more than a decade been regarded with something approaching reverence. Magazines like Flash Art encourage him to talk about the erotic quality of his photographs of minors ("I like my work to look sexy," says Clark) and to discuss his ambitions to photograph a teenager murdering his parents ("The first thing I wondered . . . was if the kid had an erection when he was killing them. I said, God, what a fucking image! I'd like to do a film where that happened"). By the 1990s, Clark had the clout and connections to put together a deal to make KIDS, a film version of Teenage Lust, complete with reprise of the rape of a drugged-out girl. But this version can be distributed since, according to the producers, the stars only appear to be underage.
-- the perfect childhood --
Photograph by Larry Clark from the book The Perfect
Childhood
copyright Larry Clark, 1993
Beginning in the 1980's, American children began to more rapidly absorbed the mass media in constructing a sense of themselves as sexual human beings, drawing from television and film and music, whatever they saw or heard in the media about sex. The model incorporates identity formation, the central task of adolescent development, as a key component. Teens' sense of who they are shapes their encounters with media, and those encounters in turn shape their sense of themselves in the ongoing process of cultural production and reproduction. Teens' appropriation of media to enhance a mood or cope with the confusing emotions that teenagers must deal with. Clark's photographic essay The Perfect Childhood examines the effect of media and youth culture. "When I was a kid, where they always used older actors to play teenagers. I would be with my friends and look up at the screen and say man you don't look like that you look like old grown-ups. So Over the Edge was one of the few movies that used real actual kids, the right age." The book features posters of Matt Dillon (co-star of Over The Edge) as well as other pop culture teen icons including River Phoenix.
His artwork is included in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Guggenheim Museum, all in New York, and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
-- bio --
Larry Clark was born in 1943 and grew up in Oklahoma. He nows in live in New York City with his three kids; one 26 and two younger boys, 17 and 13. Fifty-two years of age now and still obsessed with youth, he can purportedly be seen skateboarding with the 14- and 15-year-olds in Washington Square Park or at Brooklyn Banks. He is the one with the graying ponytail and the custom skateboard with a picture of a young girl, naked, her rear in the air, her genitals exposed...
text plagiarized from more sources than possible to identify
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