Larry Clark
Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.
Larry Clark (born January 19, 1943, Tulsa, Oklahoma, U.S.) is an American photographer and film director who was best known for his provocative works about teenagers, with drugs and sex often as central elements.
Clark’s roots in Tulsa provided the foundation for the images that eventually made him famous. Employed at first in the family portrait business, he left in 1961 to study photography at the Layton School of Art in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He returned to Tulsa after serving from 1964 to 1966 in the U.S. Army in Vietnam, and he began to freelance there and in New York City.
Clark also worked on an independent documentary project in Tulsa, recording himself and his teenage friends, who were involved in a culture of drug addiction, uncontrolled sexuality, and violence. As an active participant, Clark was able to invest his images with a powerful immediacy. The photographs were published in 1971 as Tulsa, a book that established Clark’s national reputation.
Although Clark claimed the work of documentarian Dorothea Lange and photojournalist W. Eugene Smith as influences, his images are not easily categorized as either social documentation or journalism. They differ in sensibility, exhibiting neither the compassion nor the sense of mission that characterized the work of the older photographers. Indeed, Clark’s work was applauded expressly because it lacked what was then seen as old-fashioned sentiment. He continued to document teenage alienation in Teenage Lust (1983), The Perfect Childhood (1991), and 1992 (1992).
In the 1990s Clark extended his work to filmmaking by directing Kids (1995), a fictionalized account of teenagers involved in a skateboarding and nightclub culture in New York City, which was critically acclaimed, though the film’s powerful and candid portrayal of teenage sexuality and drug abuse made it controversial. Clark went on to make other films, including Another Day in Paradise (1998), Bully (2001), Wassup Rockers (2005), and The Smell of Us (2014). Marfa Girl (2012), which is set in Marfa, Texas, centres on a young woman who is raped; a sequel was released in 2018. Ken Park (2002; codirected with Ed Lachman), a drama about four teens that features graphic sex and violence, was banned in Australia and never received a theatrical release in the United States.