Looking at the grainy image of a boy taking a swig of alcohol while getting his shoe polished, I momentarily considered perhaps Larry Clark’s Return was not as intense like leafing through the barrage of photographs, each one as equally intense, in Tulsa (1971). Before leaving for the Vietnam War in 1964 on the cusp of adulthood, Larry and his friends in Tulsa had been sniffing the drug store inhaler Valo and taking in the amphetamine in it. Two years later, when he was back, he switched it up for heroin.
He was already familiar with the camera, with his mother being a studio photographer, and turned his lens towards his own community, who were getting high with him. This was the time when college campuses in the United States were embracing marijuana, and the journalist Tom Wolfe was following Ken Kesey and his LSD-fuelled trips in California, and heroin considered the drug of the inner city, just before Nixon’s war on drugs in the early ‘70s. Amidst it all was the utopia of the American suburbia, where supposedly everyone was ‘safe’ from all the evil in the world, beyond their segregated, white-picket fences.
Interestingly, Clark’s mother photographed mothers and babies. In Tulsa, a woman in the later stages of pregnancy pierced her arm with a needle. Those who shatter illusions of the American dream and family values have held Clark’s fascination over the years – in his book The Perfect Childhood (1993), he showcased his collection of newspaper clippings of teens murdering their parents, growing up witnessing their parents kill their partners and self-asphyxiation for sexual pleasure causing the death of some youths – parents should be aware, the report read.
Of course, Clark had his fair share of controversy, with the book being banned for a few years from the US, and then a couple of years later with his most influential film, Kids (1995), where he worked with a group of teenagers skateboarding in New York to depict their narratives of teenage delinquency. Some of them had felt exploited and thought the film was an unrealistic depiction of their reality, as they expressed in Eddie Martin’s We Were Once Kids (2021).
Fifty years from when it all began with Tulsa, Clark has opened up his nearly-ten-year long archive of photographs from 1962-1973, documenting the intimate lives of suburban American teenagers for his Return monograph. The eeriness of something happening creeps up gradually in the black and white pages, almost as if he were carefully making a movie. METAL sits down with Clark for eleven questions on his new book, what interests him about youth subcultures today, and how bookmaking is nearly like filmmaking.
What made you return to your Tulsa archive of photographs? Over the years, did you go over these photographs every now and then?
I have always returned to the old Tulsa era photographs over the years between large projects. For me, they represented the first time when I found what I was most interested in. So that facet always helps to shape ideas for new projects.
Return seems to be shaped almost like a narrative that starts from the day and ends at night, with the nightlights. The more everyday, so-called ‘innocent’ photos are there in the beginning, until it moves on to the actual drug taking — was this what you had in mind while structuring the book?
Yes, the narrative structure for the Return book was shaped through conversations with my friend and assistant Zeljko. We had been having a lot of conversations about what concepts were originally elicited in Tulsa and how the present aesthetic climate could be more profoundly impacted by a bit more subtlety and delicacy.
An interesting aspect is the presence of children in Return, who weren’t there in the original publication. There was a single pregnant girl shooting heroine, obviously implying a child in the future. What made you add children here? Were you trying to create a future narrative, taking up the story from where you stopped with Tulsa?
Well, the children in Return help to show that these people or characters aren’t just fringe-types, but people with seemingly normal lives that were also going down the rabbit hole of shooting drugs. It’s a thing that happens then and still happens today — there are addicts that lay their babies down, right next to them while shooting up.
How do you approach your bookmaking practice compared to your filmmaking practice?
I think of bookmaking and filmmaking fairly similarly. There’s an arc to both where you introduce the characters and then watch how their stories unfold over the passage of time.
How do you approach language while writing your screenplays or books (A Little Rape, for example), where you'd rather not make it comfortable for normative society to consume? Are there any boundaries you'd rather not cross?
I try to use language in the same way that real people use it. Some poets and writers can be very flowery with their words, which can be beautiful, but that’s not how I choose to use them. Boundaries can be difficult to push, but it is important to do so.
When I first started photographing, there were a lot of taboos, and I was interested in showing things that were not typically publicly seen. Today it’s different in that nothing is that shocking to people, yet many things are still sensitive to touch on. This fine line is where I think a lot of interesting work can be done.
When I first started photographing, there were a lot of taboos, and I was interested in showing things that were not typically publicly seen. Today it’s different in that nothing is that shocking to people, yet many things are still sensitive to touch on. This fine line is where I think a lot of interesting work can be done.
How would you explain your continued preoccupation throughout your life with subcultures and what the US state would term as teenage ‘delinquency’? Are you still part of the scene?
Subcultures were always incredibly interesting to me — they still are. They are sort of these little tribes of people that don’t necessarily fit in anywhere else, but they all have some common threads that they share. Most of the people I surround myself with to this day represent one subculture or another.
How have you always wanted to depict the sensuality of young bodies and youth?
Well, the sensuality of youth is something that I’ve always been attracted to. In a way, I’m documenting things that I wanted to be able to do when I was younger, or to imagine reliving if they are things that I had gotten to do. As they are rooted in basic human desires, showing them in these contexts has a sort of universal appeal.
Was everyone in Tulsa comfortable with your camera, the entire time throughout large amounts of time you spent with them, either sleeping or during sex? Were you the only one with a camera?
Everyone we were hanging around with in the Tulsa days were fine with me having a camera. If I happened to forget it, they would always ask, “Larry where’s your camera?” It was just another prop that everyone was used to seeing around — wherever we happened to be.
What were their reactions when they saw your photos? Are they in Tulsa even today and are you still in touch with any of them?
The people in the photos were happy to see their lives depicted in a real way. There aren’t many of the original gang still around. David Roper just died earlier this year. His house was the one where most of those early photos took place in. I’m sort of the last one still standing from this era.
In most of your work, you follow the narratives of men with women who were their partners. Were communities of primarily men the ones you had access to? Marfa 2 primarily followed female narratives, although stylistically it seemed to be more mainstream than your usual style.
Well, I obviously have friends that are both male and female and am interested in showing all kinds of connections between people, not just the traditional gender roles or relationships.
Last question, did you watch any films you thought were interesting, recently? What projects are you working on right now? I think there was a project (Five Women) that was supposed to happen.
I tend to go back and forth between watching old movies and seeing what new directors are up to. Lately I’ve been most interested in earlier stuff that influenced me when I was younger, but that can change anytime. Lately I did a little ‘acting’ for my assistant Zeljko’s movie and have a few exhibitions of my photographs coming up — one of my ‘90s skater photographs in a solo show of my work that will open in this winter in NYC.
