Larry Clark first came to prominence in the New York art world with the publication of Tulsa (1971), a collection of graphic photographs of Clark and his friends hanging out, using drugs, having sex, and playing with guns in the homes and suburbs of that Midwestern city. As a photographer and filmmaker, Clark has focused his energies on themes of adolescent angst, self-destruction, physical violence, male aggression, raw sexuality and drug culture.
Inspired by the conventions of documentary and the immediacy of montage, Clark either records or creates intimate situations that indict the viewer’s voyeuristic fascination with the potential for violence in human subjectivity and the interactions that linger beyond normative veneers. Clark may be criticised for condoning, exploiting or enabling destructive activities and for sympathising with white male excess, but Clark maintains that his work presents cautionary moral tales of under-explored social and cultural dysfunction and marginalisation. Clark’s work provokes much discussion, often as a result of censorship, about the psychic and physical nature of adolescence and the widespread unease, silence and blindness to the tensions in adolescent and adult-adolescent relationships.
Clark began his career as a photographer assisting his mother’s business, going door-to-door as a baby portrait photographer in his hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma. At the age of 18, Clark enrolled in a commercial photography school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Influenced by students at a nearby art school and the work of W. Eugene Smith, Clark began to see his medium as capable of presenting complex information and narrative. Clark’s friends in Tulsa had long been accustomed to seeing him with a camera, and Clark began to photograph unsanitised aspects of adolescence in white suburbia. Alluding to the formal and autobiographical conventions of documentary, and using a 35mm camera, wide-angle lens and available light sources, Tulsa records graphic scenes of sex, violence and drug use in youth culture as a naturalised activity. Drafted into the army in 1964, Clark served in Vietnam until 1966, after which he travelled the United States, living in New York and New Mexico. In 1971 he met Danny Seymour, who had worked with Robert Frank, and Seymour was inspired to fund Tulsa. Clark received a $5,000 ‘Imprimatur of Excellence’ grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for his work on Tulsa, but after several arrests and convictions for drug and alcohol abuse, violence, and shooting a friend during an argument, Clark served 19 months in a maximum security prison beginning in 1976.
Tulsa, the first book published by Ralph Gibson’s Lustrum fine art press, became a landmark in photography in the second half of the twentieth century.
Teenage Lust (1983) is more sexual, more disturbing and far more autobiographical than Tulsa, with images of adolescents living on the edge without fear of violence, dying and death, and with photographs that place Clark’s experience directly in the context of his work.
Clark confronts his viewers with images of youth culture in self-destruction, and critics have charged that these images of teenage lust and sex often normalise male aggression and its unpleasant consequences.
Reflecting Clark’s ongoing obsession with teenagers and sexuality, The Perfect Childhood (1993) examines the influence of mass media on teenagers.
Larry Clark, 1992 (1992), Clark’s first photo-essay in colour, consists of portraits that emphasise teenage male sexuality and autoerotic play with guns.
As a filmmaker, Clark continued his interest in documenting the confusion, desire, rage, inhumanity and potential tenderness that animate human relationships. In narratives dedicated to a realistic imperative, untrained or amateur actors and convincing scenes of physical and sexual violence hint at the flaws in human character and challenge cultural veneers regarding the conflicts of adolescence.
Clark’s films have been banned in many places because they challenge cultural taboos with images of adolescent nudity, sexuality, self-destruction and brutality.
Clark’s first feature film, Kids (1995), continues themes of male aggression and drug activity, and features a male protagonist who pursues the sexual conquest of female virgins. The film follows a group of young New Yorkers over the course of 24 hours as they go about their daily activities: hanging out, skateboarding, taking drugs, getting violent and having sex. The film’s narrative is driven by one of the girls discovering she is HIV positive and searching for the boy who seduced and infected her.
Clark commissioned the screenplay from Harmony Korine, who was a skateboarder in his final year of high school when he met Clark. Shot in a vérité style with mostly untrained actors, Kids reflects Clark’s desire to make ”the great American teen movie, like the great American novel.” Kids won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
Clark’s second feature film, Another Day in Paradise (1998), is a gritty coming-of-age story set in the 1970s. Based on a novel by ex-convict Eddie Little, it explores the conflict between a life of drugs and crime and the desire for a family, as two aging junkies mentor two young lovers. The daily life of heroin users, with its inherent violence, seems almost incidental to the ordinary quest for strong interpersonal relationships.
Bully (2001), based on the book Bully: A True Story of High School Revenge by Jim Schutze, retells the story of an actual murder of a high school bully by a group of high school friends in Hollywood, Florida in 1993. Ken Park (2002), co-directed with Ed Lachman, is set in the suburbs of Visalia, California. Focusing on four teenagers and the adults in their lives, the film exposes the difficult sexual desires and fears that underlie their self-identities, and many aspects of their relationships become vehicles for the expression of unconscious emotional responses. The explicit depiction of sexual practices and sexualised violence, juxtaposed with normative social veneers, suggests an insight into the darker aspects of human character.
