“I don’t want to toot my own horn, because that’s stupid, but I’m just saying that I got there early,” he says.
That movie, about a crew of aggressively malicious and morally bent skaters, including an HIV-positive Lothario who preys on virgins, became a national symbol of the directionless, self-destructive nineties youth generation.Īt its rawest and best, Clark’s work reveals a Lord of the Flies vision of being young in America-parentless kids fending for themselves, doing what they can to deny their own existences-one that’s often a few steps ahead of the news cycle. In 1983, Clark published Teenage Lust, portraits of Times Square hustlers refracted through his own emotional experience-he included family photos and shots of younger Tulsa junkies-and eventually moved into the (comparable) mainstream with the 1995 film Kids.
Ever since 1971, when Clark published Tulsa, an austere series chronicling his meth-shooting pals in sixties Oklahoma, Clark has made it his mission to document teenagers at their most deviant, their most vulnerable, their most sexually unhinged. “Larry Clark,” the first American retrospective of Clark’s work, currently on display at the International Center of Photography, demonstrates the richness with which he’s mined this single subject. That Larry Clark still has the ability to be shocked by the detached nihilism of teenage boys takes a moment to process it is, after all, the terrain he’s been exploring- exploiting, many have argued-for more than 30 years in beautiful, brutal work that’s influenced photographers like Terry Richardson and Ryan McGinley. Not a word! Can you believe it? It just blew my fucking mind, man, and I had to call someone. So I’m talking to him for hours, because I’m trying to help him with school-he needs 180 credits to graduate-and he doesn’t even mention that someone got shot at his school that day. Some innocent girl! Anyway, it happened yesterday, right? Well, I was with a kid who goes to that school yesterday-he’s in the movie. A poor 15-year-old girl shot in the head. “So I turn up the volume,” Clark says, launching into one of his digression-prone soliloquies, “and it turns out there was a shooting at the school. Suddenly, the screen cut to an exterior shot of Locke High School, located in South Central Los Angeles-a shot identical to the opening of Wassup Rockers, the film Clark’s currently editing about a crew of straight-edge Latino skaters (played by actual Locke students) who find themselves objects of fascination by rich white girls from Beverly Hills. Larry Clark, the 62-year-old photographer and director known for his obsessive chronicling of desperate teenage lives, was at the gym, sweating on the stationary bicycle and staring at the television.