The publication of Tulsa in 1971, secured the reputation of photographer Larry Clark (born 1943). Sensational at the time for its portrayal of an alienated youth culture steeped in drugs, violence, guns, and casual sex, it remains, in the artist’s words, “still dangerous.”1 The portfolio presented fifty black and white images of his Oklahoma friends during the time he was a drug addict. His brief autobiographical statement, all in lowercase, captures the book’s tone of anomie: “i was born in tulsa oklahoma in 1943. when i was sixteen i started shooting amphetamine. i shot with my friends every day for three years and then left town but i’ve gone back through the years. once the needle goes in it never comes out.”2 One of the captions is particularly disturbing, and precedes an image of a shirtless young man sitting cross legged on a bed, holding a gun: “death is more perfect than life.”3 In the book, the images are arranged in sequences that are both discrete yet interrelated. With his unsettling pictures of lives ravaged by amphetamines, Clark presents an exquisitely unmoored existence, one where domestic violence was common, as were bored teenagers unprepared for pregnancy and parenthood (women did not fare well in this environment).
Clark wanted to tell a story, and as he had been trained as a portrait photographer, he brought those skills to Tulsa: “I started making images that I couldn’t see anywhere else…all this stuff was happening around me, it’s everyday stuff for me, but you never see it, it’s forbidden to even show this or talk about it. That was my original motivation for making these photographs and there is still that aspect to my work.”4 It was a chronicle he was uniquely qualified to tell, both as a participant and as a trained photographer: “I’ve never been a distanced observer, it’s always been autobiographical, I was just one of the people, one of the guys. I happened to have a camera because my parents had this baby-photography business. When I was out with friends, shooting drugs, I would have my equipment with me, because I would be coming from or going to work.”5 His light and nimble cameras suited the conditions in which he was working, and sometimes he used a Rolleiflex, at others a Leica with a quiet shutter release.
No commercial press was willing to take on such graphic themes, and photographer Ralph Gibson agreed to publish Tulsa in a small edition through his Lustrum Press. It caused a sensation when it appeared, and in September 1971, critic A.D. Coleman described it as: ”staggering, a poignant, raw, compassionate, and utterly honest” sequence of images. In showing the drug subculture as “what it’s like from the inside,” Clark created “an intense, visceral, wrenching” document of a culture in which he was a participant.6 In exposing a world many would have preferred not to acknowledge, the artist’s purpose was not necessarily to shock, though he realized that was unavoidable: “I don’t try to be controversial, I just try to be honest and tell the truth about life. Coming from the art world, I never think there are things you can’t do or show.”7
Two main male figures are identified by name in Tulsa: Billy Mann, who died of a drug overdose in 1970, and David Roper, the latter depicted sitting in a bathtub filled with water while injecting himself in the arm with amphetamine. His expression is one of both intense concentration and reckless enjoyment; his tongue is out and his right fist clenched as he presses the needle into his flesh. The toughness of the scene contrasts with the odd sentimentality of a crude heart tattooed on his arm. In its portrayal of youthful drug use, it is emblematic of the book’s imagery. Shot in 1963, it was one of the first sets of photographs Clark made (the two others date from 1968 and 1971), and marks the beginning of Roper’s descent into addiction. A 1971 photograph shows him lying in bed and putting a needle into the arm of a woman dressed only in black panties. His hair is long and unkempt, and he is unshaven.
In his subsequent photography, Clark continued to develop the ideas he first explored in Tulsa. Teenage Lust, published in 1983 exposes the overwhelmingly sexual culture of a younger generation of adolescent Tulsans, as well as subjects from other locales, all of whom are younger than eighteen. In focusing on a comparable subgroup to Tulsa, one hidden in plain sight, he portrays the culture of nonchalant sexuality now common among teenagers. As before, Clark portrays his subjects with striking honesty, without judging them: “I don’t claim to be delivering a message.”8 The neutrality of Tulsa is characteristic of Larry Clark’s photography, which retains its controversial shock value.
Details of Clark’s biography are sketchy, and this is perhaps not surprising given his personal history. He became interested in taking pictures by the age of fourteen when he helped his mother in the family photography business. His father, a traveling salesman, hardly acknowledged him after he turned twelve. Between 1961 and 1963 he enrolled in courses in commercial photography at the Layton School of Art in Milwaukee. After two years in Wisconsin, he returned to Tulsa in 1963. He soon became addicted to drugs (at least until 1971), drank heavily for many years, and had relationships with prostitutes. Between the publication of Tulsa in 1971 and Teenage Lust in 1983, he served five years in a maximum-security prison for assaulting two men, stabbing one and shooting another. He finally got clean for his children. He has established a considerable reputation as a filmmaker, and his productions include Kids (1995), Another Day in Paradise (1997), Bully (2001), and Ken Park (2002). In 2010 the Musée d’Art Moderne de Ville de Paris held a retrospective of his work. Ironically, anyone under the age of eighteen was not allowed to see it.
Cameron Kelly
Larry Clark, untitled, 1963, TULSA (portfolio), gelatin silver print, 20.3 x 31.1 cm, SOLARI 94.006.019L