"I wanted to present the way kids see things, but without all this
baggage...You know...they're living in the moment not thinking about anything
beyond that and that's what I wanted to catch. And I wanted the viewer
to feel like you're there with them -- you can be there fucking, smoking
dope, having sex..."
- Larry Clark
Larry Clark is a story-teller. His stories -- which boldly confront themes of youth culture, sex, violence, and drugs -- are told through two feature films (KIDS, 1995; and Another Day in Paradise, 1998) and four art books (Tulsa, 1971; Teenage Lust, 1983; 1992, 1992; and The Perfect Childhood,1993). While best known for the spiraling controversy in the U.S. and abroad surrounding the release of the independent film KIDS at the Sundance Film Festival in 1995, Larry Clark also remains notorious for his distinctive, sexually-charged photographic essays of youth culture and self-destruction. His lesser known art books, Teenage Lust, 1992 and The Perfect Childhood, provide an equally provocative look into the alienation of teen youth. Clark acts as voyeur, or more like a detached observer, and his images reflect upon the drug addiction and raw sexuality that marked his teen and early adult years.
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
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
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
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.
International Center of Photography
Widely regarded as one of the most important and influential American photographers of his generation, Larry Clark is known for both his raw and contentious photographs and his controversial films focusing on teen sexuality, violence, and drug use. Clark burst into public consciousness with his landmark book Tulsa in 1971, and has continued to use photography to explore urgent social issues pertaining to youth culture. In particular, he is interested in investigating the perils and vulnerabilities of adolescent masculinity, which he often explores from an autobiographical perspective.
Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1943, Clark learned photography early. His mother was an itinerant baby photographer, and Clark himself was enlisted in the family business from the age of thirteen. By sixteen, Clark began shooting amphetamines with his friends. Always armed with a camera, Clark produced remarkably intimate and beautiful pictures of his drug-shooting coterie from 1963 to 1971. These pictures, later published in Tulsa, trace the trajectories of three young men through idealism and ecstasy to trauma and paranoia in the desolate afternoons of the Vietnam-era Midwest. In subsequent works Clark continued to explore and record the challenges faced by male teens: in Teenage Lust (1983) he chronicled the next generation of Tulsa teens as well as young male hustlers in Times Square; in The Perfect Childhood (1992), he looked at tabloid teen criminals and teenage models; and in the photo series “Skaters” (1992-95) and the film Kids (1995), he captured the community of skateboarders in New York's Washington Square Park. In all these works, Clark pursues a set of related themes: the destructiveness of dysfunctional family relationships, masculinity and the roots of violence, the links between mass imagery and social behaviors, and the construction of identity in adolescence.
To address these issues Clark often uses sexually explicit imagery, as well as scenes of overt drug use and violence, actions that are addressed casually by his subjects but which are often shocking to his audiences. These works are at once unimaginable and unforgettable. Reflecting the mission of the International Center of Photography—to show the ways photography represents and transforms the human condition—this exhibition presents influential work that has often been misunderstood. Clark’s challenging work in photography and film, which addresses such socially relevant topics as teen violence, pornography, masculinity, censorship, and the influence of the media, will, we hope, afford viewers the opportunity to engage in a popular dialogue about these controversial issues. Few other artists have addressed these themes with such candor.
– Brian Wallis, Curator
Clark’s harrowing photo book Tulsa (1971) documents the aimless drug use, violence, and sex activities of Clark’s circle of friends in his hometown. Taken in three protracted series between 1963 and 1971, the Tulsa photographs combine the documentary style and narrative sequencing of a Life magazine photo essay with startling intimacy and emotional intensity. The graphic and controversial subject matter, the seemingly illicit nature of the viewer's engagement, the remarkable low-light photography, and the restrained editorial pacing distinguish the extraordinary new style of subjective documentary that these pictures announced. But more than that, the pictures and the book were an extension of Clark’s life. The book opens with this succinct narrative: “i was born in tulsa oklahoma in 1943. when i was sixteen i started shooting amphetamine. i shot with my friends everyday for three years and then left town but i’ve gone back through the years. once the needle goes in it never comes out. L.C.”
The set of vintage prints in this exhibition are those that were used in the printing of the original edition of the book, which was published by Clark’s friend and fellow photographer Ralph Gibson. The elusive but tightly edited sequence of Tulsa meant that many great photographs were not published; included here are a selection of vintage Tulsa outtakes. Also included are a selection of materials from Clark’s autobiographical punk Picasso (2003) that comprise Tulsa-era photographs, artifacts, and family memorabilia.
Clark’s second book, Teenage Lust (1983), was subtitled “An Autobiography of Larry Clark,” though it is not autobiographical in any conventional sense. It includes early family snapshots and follows a rough biographical chronology, but Clark's primary intention seems to be to “turn back the years” and to relive moments of his own teen past through images of others. This installation shows the photographs and other materials that were used to make the original book. Roughly divided into three sections, Teenage Lust begins with Clark’s family photographs and his move to New York City: then contrasts his various run-ins with the law with his quest for a utopian hippie life in New Mexico: and concludes with a powerful and touching series of portraits of young male hustlers in the Times Square area. More sprawling, experimental, and explicit than Tulsa, Teenage Lust has at its core the rawness, vulnerability, and uncertainty of adolescence, a key strain that runs throughout Clark’s work.
SKATERS
The “Skaters” series assembles color portraits of teenage skateboarders that Clark took in New York City during the 1990s. Some of these portraits were taken in Clark’s studio, but most were made in Washington Square Park, where he met Harmony Korine, who would later write the screenplay for Kids, and the skaters who would become members of the cast of Kids. The freedom of skateboarders appealed to Clark; these were kids who could navigate the city on their own, without parents. This tension between youthful independence and parental neglect is a theme throughout Clark's later work. The series also represents a return to a more documentary style, and has a clear link to Clark’s film work.
FILMS
Video screening Schedule at ICP 35mm films at the Pioneer Theater
The distinctive style, controversial subject matter, and critical success of Clark's small body of feature films easily establish him as one of the leading independent directors today. After three decades of still photography, Clark's move to filmmaking seemed natural; he had set his sights on movies since the early Tulsa days. His first feature film, Kids (1995), was a day-in-the-life tale of a young HIV-positive lothario and his skateboarding teen cohorts. Its documentary-like look and its nonjudgmental point of view, particularly on teen sex and drug use, created a national controversy when first released. The follow-up to Kids, Another Day in Paradise (1998), was Clark’s version of a crime-spree road movie, in which two experienced criminals and junkies take a young couple under their wing. It evolves into the young man’s coming-of-age story as his makeshift family disintegrates under the weight of the violence and drug addiction around him. His subsequent films, especially Bully (2001) and the unreleased Ken Park, offered an increasingly bleak and explicit view of the alienation, boredom, and hostility of white, middle-class youth culture in the context of rudderless parenting. Clark has said that these films are intended to spark a dialogue about what is really going on with America’s youth. So, while these films revive the images of teen sex and violence, Clark really sees them as about a loss of innocence.
KIDSPlot Summary for Kids (1995)
Plot Outline: An amoral, HIV-positive skateboarder sets out to deflower as many virgins as possible while a local girl who contracted his disease tries to save his next target from her same fate.
Plot Synopsis: Disturbing, dark, low-budget independent film about teen-agers growing up in poverty in New York City. The story focuses on Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick), a teen who has a goal to de-flower as many virgins as he can. When one of his old encounters discovers that she is H.I.V.-positive, after only one encounter with a guy, Telly remains undaunted.
Editorial Reviews: Larry Clark's controversial film about New York City adolescents walking the AIDS tightrope is also an unblinking look at the dehumanizing rituals of growing up. But it really doesn't add up to more than the sum of its various shocks--virgin busting, skinny-dipping, male callousness--overlayed with middle-class disapproval. Clark is hectoring us for cutting kids loose at a terrible time in modern American history, but so are a lot of other people, who also offer alternatives and ideas. The film does nothing to push us toward new thoughts, new solutions, new dreams. It is more like a window onto our worst fantasies about what our children are doing out there on the streets. --Tom Keogh
Movie Description: Powerful and passionate, colorful and compelling, Larry Clark's KIDS is 24 frenetic hours in the life of a group of contemporary teenagers who, like all teenagers, believe they are invincible. With breathtaking images from one of the world's most renowned photographers, KIDS is a deeply affecting, no-holds-barred landscape of words and images, depicting with raw honesty the experiences, attitudes and uncertainties of innocence lost. KIDS gets under the skin and lingers, long after it is viewed. The kids at the core of the story are just that: teenagers living the urban melee of modern-day America. But while these kids dwell in the big city, their story could, quite possibly, happen anywhere.
Raw. Like watching a documentary on a different species, August 9,
2005
My pets behave better than this. And yet, this is what kids are doing. This
is not an exaggeration or a class statement; these are real kids in real neighborhoods
strolling the streets with no moral direction.
It really was almost like watching a documentary on a primate species, how the males and females gather in separate groups to chirp and chatter at each other until it's mating season. Then they all get together in a big pile and have at it with whoever is handiest.
The plot? A day in the life of aimless kids: virgin conquests, shoplifting, public urinating, drinking, smoking, getting high, breaking into a pool for a skinny dip, street fighting (complete with a brutal, perhaps deadly beating for a simple transgression), raves, public fornication, and one girl's discovery that she has AIDS.
There are two scenes that stand out in the movie, the first being when Telly briefly comes home, and his mother is sitting on her hinder, smoking, nursing her new baby, and watching TV. She barely notices Telly is in the room, except to tell him to be quiet so he wouldn't wake the baby. Parenting at its very worst, and you just know that little baby will grow up the same as Telly.
The second is the scene where Casper wakes up after the party. He moves from the tub he passed out in, past his friend who is unconscious over the toilet, to the kitchen where he immediately drains the dregs of the leftover beer bottles and lights a cigarette. He then goes on to take advantage of a girl who is passed out. Wow. Another morning in hell.
Larry Clark has done pretty well with Kids, though his work with 'Bully' was better, smoother, less raw while still being on the cutting edge. The performances from Leo Fitzpatrick (Telly), Justin Pierce (Casper), Chloe Sevigny (Jennie), and Rosario Dawson (Ruby) are more than acceptable. Clark certainly has a talent for bringing teenage angst and degradation to the screen, and for using brutal scenes to hone his dagger of truth home to those brave enough to watch his films. Enjoy!
And I was still playing with Barbies....., October 22, 2005
OK, so what was I doing at age 13??? Mom, wherever you are, THANK YOU for sheltering me from a world like this. I had to see this, and come on, you know the urge is killing you if you haven't yet. I caught myself peeking at my TV through my clasped fingers, trying desperately to shield myself from the gruesome, raw behavior of KIDS, but I couldn't ignore the intensity.
This movie is documentary-style fiction bringing the reality of teens,
sex, and AIDS, right to your uncomfortable viewing pleasure. The actors
(these kids..literally) show us a world of unrestrained promiscuity
that is at once shocking and crass.
I keep going back and forth with this one, asking myself ..."Could I show
this to my own kids someday"?... It's like asking myself if I will ever
be prepared for a tragic car accident.
I found it interesting that in real life, many of these teen actors "lost
their way" after this film became an independent favorite.
Prepare yourself to enter a world of 13 yr. old hell. If you can relate to
the imagery, you will find it disturbing. If you can't relate, you will find
it disgusting. Either way, KIDS is not to be overlooked-let this film stand
as a reminder of how admirable maturity is. If you can bear it, I highly suggest
watching this film with your teen. I can see this film being an excellent introduction
to the reality of promiscuity and unprotected sex. (Be warned: you may find
yourself handing out condoms on your street corner after the credits role,
but hey, maybe schools will follow suit, eh??)
Summary written by Allison L. Venezio {YankeeSNL01@aol.com}
A controversial portrayal of teens in New York City which exposes a world which is deeply disturbing. The film focuses on a freckled boy Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick), whose idea of safe sex is to have sex with only virgins. But one girl from one of his past unprotected passion test positive for HIV, and soon finds him making love yet to another unsuspecting girl
Summary written by Paul Watabe
A disturbing portrayal of teenage life, AIDS, and the Kids of New York City. Controversial in its content, the film exposes the grim reality of a group of skate-boarders in the space of 24 hours. Primarily the story consists of Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick) a 17 year old slacker whose mission is to de-flower as many young girls as possible, whilst unprotected. Things turn bad when an old flame finds out she has tested positive for HIV and the only person she has had sex with is Telly. She chases through New York to find him but is too late as he has already de-flowered yet another innocent pre-teen.
Summary written by Dan Adamson {dan@clanjade.freeserve.co.uk}
The movie Kids is a view of a city kids world. You watch Telly, a unsupervised teen in the streets of New York taking advantage of innocent young girls not knowing he has HIV but one of the girls he slept with a year before does. In knowing this she runs the streets looking for him while he plans to deflower another young girl. And in the midst of all this, you see kids as young as 10 or 11 using drugs and alcohol with some of the older kids. Kids is basically a movie that warns you what the hell could be happening to your very own child.
Summary written by Joe Sanders (deathwish_21@hotmail.com)
Larry Clark: Punk Picasso
Disturbing images of wayward youth from a controversial American photographer
Like Michael Jackson, Larry Clark is a man considered lost in a state of perpetual
childhood, but the two artists have completely different obsessions. While
America's own Peter Pan remains fixated with prepubescent innocence, the photographer
Clark is drawn to the reckless, nihilistic and thrill-seeking excesses of adolescence.
Capturing the wayward drug use and nihilism of his peers in his hometown in Oklahoma, Clark's self-published photo book, simply titled Tulsa, caused a sensation in 1971 and was heralded as a classic document of alterative lifestyles. Since the unexpected impact of the book, Clark has moved on to garner more controversy with his photographs and movies about youth, which include Kids, Bully and Another Day in Paradise.
Bringing together photos and artwork, childhood memorabilia and newspaper clippings of bizarre and violent crimes, Punk Picasso, Clark's latest book and accompanying exhibition at the Watari-um Museum of Contemporary Art, is a veritable scrapbook of his 40 years documenting America's social outcasts.
The first floor of "Punk Picasso" frames Clark's outsider friends shooting up, playing cards or engaging in fellatio (in images from Tulsa) against his childhood backdrop of R&B, family photographs and baseball paraphernalia.
Even the earliest shots in Tulsa, from 1963, were taken after Clark's
schooldays were over, and he freely admits that his subsequent work
has been an attempt to reclaim the youth he failed to record when he
experienced it firsthand. His photo book Teenage Lust (1983) shows youngsters
goofing off or engaged in sexual acts, but it differs from the Tulsa
work in that, besides using kids off the street, Clark also paid professional
models to pose for him. This book, and the 1995 film Kids (which, in
a way, the book grew into), enjoyed a mixed reception. Just as Clark
won acclaim for portraying a side of America usually swept under the
carpet, he was also accused of exploiting the children he portrays.
More shocking, in fact, than any particular images are the glimpses of Clark's
mindset that can be seen in the numerous press interviews on display. Clark
admits that his ultimate photo-op would be one of the numerous cases of teenagers
killing their own parents (with a special interest in whether the perpetrator
was sexually aroused by the act)-not exactly the usual career goal for a 61-year-old
who is himself a father.
The photographer has been accused of deliberate sensationalism and of being a twisted sociopath, but Clark defends himself from such criticism by saying he is simply depicting reality. Yet clearly the choice of subject matter an artist gravitates toward can say as much about him or her as the world it represents.
Photographs of teen skateboarders hanging out in Central Park, the kind depicted in Kids, are revealing for the fact that only one image in this section shows them actually skating, Clark's interest lies in the boys' cool street fashions, bravado poses and, most of all, in their bare-chested physiques. Clark is often mistaken for a homosexual, though it appears more likely that the straight artist's homoeroticism is narcissistic at root.
The main problem with this exhibition is not the odd example of shocking content (there is, in fact, much worse out there), but the inability, or unwillingness, of Clark to offer any kind of real insight into what he witnesses.
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Larry
Clark Quick 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...