Larry Clark’s Pictures of Survival : A troubled upbringing inspired his early photographs of a violent drug culture and his current work about victimized adolescents

In 1971 a 28-year-old photographer named Larry Clark published a book of photographs called “Tulsa.” Comprised of 50 black-and-white photographs shot from 1963 through 1971, the book sold for just $5 a copy and was published in a small edition of 2,700 at a cost of $8,000. A lone wolf from Oklahoma, Clark had only the most tenuous ties to the world of fine art photography at the time--he had never exhibited his work, and this, his first book, was released with no fanfare or promotional push. Nonetheless, it’s unlikely that anyone who saw that book has ever forgotten it.

Hailed today as a landmark work of autobiographical photography, “Tulsa” is a brutally frank essay on the wasted lives of a group of amphetamine addicts who lived in Tulsa during the ‘60s. A matter-of-fact chronicle of a violent lifestyle that revolved around hypodermics, guns, casual sex and petty crime, “Tulsa” was not a detached portrait of some exotic subculture Clark examined with the cool curiousity of an artist--this was Clark’s life and these were his friends.

As he explains in the book’s brief introductory text:

“i was born in Tulsa, Okla. 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.”

Clark has spent the better part of his life struggling to free himself from that dismal prophesy and to break away from the poisonous involvements that simultaneously fueled his work and threatened to destroy him. He credits a combination of luck, genetics and art as being the lifeline that allowed him to survive an experience that killed most of his cronies. However, Clark’s art has come slowly, and for long spells, it didn’t come at all.

He spent the better part of the ‘70s in a stoned stupor, and 19 months (1976-78) in jail for violating the parole he was sentenced to for shooting an acquaintance in the arm during a poker game. Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about Clark is that through it all, he retained a sense of himself as an artist and managed to transform the wretched experiences he repeatedly brought on himself into powerful photographs that are insightful, moving and curiously tender.

Clark’s recent exhibition at the Luhring Augustine Gallery in Soho is a comeback of sorts. Just the third body of work he’s completed in 27 years, it’s also his first show of new pieces in seven years (much of this work is scheduled for exhibition at the Luhring Augustine Hetzler Gallery in Santa Monica in 1992). Lauded as a “powerful commentary on social hypocrisy” by New York Times photography critic Andy Grundberg, the show includes a series of provocative photo collages centering on juvenile delinquent boys, male teen idols and young hustlers on Times Square and is a further articulation of themes introduced in “Tulsa.”

Meeting with the 47-year-old artist at his gallery, one encounters a tall, rangy man who looks considerably younger than his years and remarkably healthy in light of his past. Amiable and eager to accommodate the interviewer’s needs, he is nonetheless guarded and a bit shy. One also notes that while he seems to have made peace with the troubled adolescence that launched him on the rocky road he’s traveled, those early wounds aren’t completely healed--he speaks of his past in a bruised and faintly wistful voice.

Born in Tulsa in 1943, the middle of three children, Clark was a sensitive child who came into puberty late and stuttered severely. He saw little of his mother who worked long hours as a baby photographer to supplement the family’s meager income, and his father--a severely depressed man who spent most of his time locked in his bedroom eating ice cream--ignored Clark completely but for occasional outbursts of criticism and rage.

“My father never taught me anything, never hung out with me and never talked to me,” Clark recalls. “Beginning around puberty I was totally by myself. I don’t want to make any easy cop-outs or blame anybody, but my family did play a role in the direction I took in life.

“Whatever happens to you during adolescence has a tremendous impact on your life,” says Clark, whose obsession with the theme of adolescence can be seen as an attempt to reconstruct his own misspent youth. “This has certainly been true for myself and most of my friends. I’ve known so many people whose lives were permanently ruined by the time they were 15--their whole mode of thinking is irrevocably formed by then. If they couldn’t get laid, if they had acne, if they were made fun of, if that was the best time of their life and it’s downhill from there on--however you’re treated marks you permanently. There is no ideal childhood, of course, but it’s almost impossible to navigate that period of your life without good parenting--and that’s missing for so many kids.”

In his early teens Clark fell in with a tough crowd that introduced him to drugs. At the same time he began assisting his mother with her door-to-door baby photography business, so his interest in photography and drugs developed simultaneously.

“Working with my mother all the time it became a natural thing for me to have a camera,” he recalls, “then one day I realized you could do more with photography than just take baby pictures. I also realized I was part of a world I’d never seen photographed before.”

Following high school graduation in 1960, Clark attended the Layton School of Art in Wisconsin from 1961-63, then in 1963 he returned to Tulsa and spent the next two years taking drugs and shooting the pictures that eventually led to “Tulsa.”

One of the most striking things about the people in these photographs is the casual way they toy with death--they seem to have no regard whatsoever for their own lives or anyone else’s. People overdose, pregnant teen-aged girls inject themselves with drugs and their babies are born dead, loaded kids suffer accidental gunshot wounds, and nobody bats an eye.

“The people in ‘Tulsa’ had absolutely no fear of death,” Clark says. “You don’t realize you’re mortal until your early 30s, so that fear comes later in life. They had no fear, but they did have a sense of hopelessness and that’s something I felt too--that started very early for me. I think we all yearned for another way to live, yet we surrendered to a certain kind of life and a sense of despair.

“Everybody on that scene was really messed up and I always knew it wasn’t good--I never thought drugs were good. At the same time, I liked drugs and we had a lot of fun. People like to get high--it’s just part of human nature that we like to play around with our minds.

“Another reason people get into this lifestyle is boredom--it’s a pretty exciting lifestyle comparatively speaking,” he adds. “Say you’ve got a young girl who works in a bank and lives with her parents. It’s a pretty boring life, then one day she meets some character like someone from ‘Tulsa’--someone into drugs and wild kicks. That looks pretty attractive at first. Within six weeks her money’s gone, she’s lost her job, she’s using hot credit cards--and it’s exciting for a while. I’ve known countless girls like that.”

In 1964, Clark took his pictures to New York hoping to generate some interest in his work, but he was drafted before he got his foot in the door of the art world. After a two-year stint in the Army, he returned to New York where he spent the next two years immersed in the then-burgeoning hippie scene, taking drugs and pictures and partying.

Asked if he was influenced during those years by the photography trends of the early ‘60s, Clark says “I don’t think I was influenced by people like Robert Frank, but I was certainly inspired by them. The movies probably played the biggest role in shaping my sense of aesthetics, but basically I’ve always had my own sense of the way my work should look and don’t like to be influenced by anybody.

“I would say, however, that I was influenced in the early ‘60s by Bob Dylan and Lenny Bruce. Those guys told the truth and I felt they were doing something important. The photographer Eugene Smith was also important to me for that reason. Smith worked for Life magazine and he made a big stink about their approach to photojournalism, which he felt didn’t go deep enough. He eventually resigned from Life and went on to write these long diatribes about truth and photography. More than Gene’s photos, I think his philosophy was important for me.”

In 1967, Clark traveled through Mexico, then returned to Tulsa for a brief spell during which he lived with several prostitutes and shot more pictures that would eventually turn up in the book. In 1969, he moved to Santa Fe with a girlfriend, then in 1970 he returned to Tulsa, and with the financial aid and encouragement of photographers Danny Seymour and Ralph Gibson, finally completed the book.

“The publication of the book affected me lots of different ways,” he recalls. “Some people were frightened by it, others were sympathetic and thought it was some big anti-drug statement, and lots of girls in black leather jackets came around wanting to date me because they thought I was a Hell’s Angel or something. My reaction to it all was just to keep moving.

“At the time, people told me I should get on the lecture circuit and give talks at colleges and so forth, but I thought that was the worst thing I’d ever heard. To think I’d take my life and my friends lives and run around speaking about it like that was the biggest put-down in the world--I wanted to punch the people who even suggested it. I wasn’t into promoting myself or trying to make money off the book, which I never did. The important thing has always been just to do the work and get it out there.”

After the publication of “Tulsa,” Clark received an NEA grant for his next book, which took him 12 years to complete. The positive response “Tulsa” elicited did little to quell his appetite for drugs and wild living, and he spent the next five years involved in various run-ins with the law, as his friends from the early days in Tulsa died one by one.

“By the mid-’70s my life really derailed,” he says. “I was totally out of control and doing lots of drugs. Basically, I took on the combined persona of a lot of the people in the book and had begun acting out the sorts of scenarios I hoped to photograph. I was conscious of what was happening to me but it was such a crazy time I couldn’t control it.”

This increasingly chaotic period didn’t end until Clark was thrown in prison in 1976. After his release in 1978, he returned to New York, where he met his wife of 12 years. The Clarks and their two young children live in Princeton, and Larry commutes into Manhattan every day to work in his Soho studio.

“I stopped getting high when I was 35 because I finally just burned out,” he says of that turning point 12 years ago. “Lots of friends were dying then--really tough men and women were just cracking--and my body totally broke down and I was forced to clean up. It’s good it happened because my spirit and mind were pretty shot by then, but nobody knew how to quit drugs in those days. People understand how to quit drugs now, but in those days it was assumed you either committed suicide or kept going until you died.”

In 1983, Clark published his second book, “Teenage Lust,” which was a further exploration of adolescent rites of passage. Focusing on sex this time rather than drugs and violence, it was every bit as powerful as his first book--in fact, some consider it the better of his two books. Structured as an autobiography, the book includes pictures of Clark from throughout his life, and concludes with an autobiographical text so nakedly honest that it’s painful to read.

“With ‘Teenage Lust’ I really thought I’d gone too far, particularly with the text,” he says. “I figured I’d lose all my friends and my wife and nobody would ever speak to me again, but I knew I had to do it because it was a strong piece of work.

“And with this new work I feel I’ve gone too far again. It’s funny, but it seems that when I get scared and think I’m showing too much, that’s when I know it’s time to show. It’s hard on a person working this way, but I’m from Oklahoma and the philosophy there is run with the ball,” he adds with a rueful laugh. “That’s the only explanation I’ve been able to come up with for the life I’ve led.”

Like “Tulsa” (which went through a second printing in 1982), “Teenage Lust” was a big critical success and a second edition came out in 1987. Both books are currently out of print, and if you manage to find one the price tag can be as high as $750. Clark himself owns just two copies of each book, so they hardly made him rich--in fact, it wasn’t until 1979 that he began being able to make a living from his work, which is still modestly priced: A black-and-white print goes for $1,200, while his large new collages which go up to 4 x 5 feet, sell for around $30,000.

Presently at work on a new book to be published next year by Thea Westreich, Clark describes his new work as an extension of the early stuff in its preoccupation with the loss of innocence.

“We’re all fascinated by the loss of innocence because we have a deep need to believe in something and innocence is tied to that need. I feel less and less innocent as I get older, but I still continue to be surprised when something happens to shatter the bubble and I’m forced to look at the fact that you can count on almost nothing. Still, none of us ever really wise up. Something new comes along and we fall into that same naive mode of perception.”

As with his early work, Clark’s new pieces--which include news accounts of teen-age murderers and members of satanic cults--involve an element of sensationalism. One could make the case that this is the lazy man’s way to powerful art--that anyone dealing with such volatile subject matter could turn a few heads. Clark disagrees.

“Many people photograph subject matter that’s potentially very powerful and they just don’t know how to do it. It often happens that photographers shoot people involved in disturbing things and they make them look so horrible that the viewer can say this has nothing to do with me. I depict the people I shoot as real human beings so people relate to them regardless of what they’re doing.”

Clark’s photographs are indeed much more accessible than most work of this genre, but his portraits of the young and the restless are still subtly horrifying. Asked to explain the human compulsion to look at disturbing images, Clark says “people like to live vicariously through images of other people. But I think the reason people are drawn to my pictures is because I’m a good photographer--although a lot of people think I’m a total primitive. When ‘Tulsa’ came out, people said ‘the photography’s no good, but it’s a real good book anyhow.’ I think the reason people perceive the work that way is because the subject matter upstages the technique.”

Clark is admittedly conscious of the technical composition of his pictures; how conscious is he of his attitude towards the people he depicts? Does he intend that his pictures convey any judgment?

“I consider myself a moral person, but my photographs aren’t calculated to address those issues. Sure, the pictures comment on social hypocrisy and the ways disfunctional families affect kids, but I’m not trying to make some grand statement on human nature--I’m just trying to show things the way they are. These are simply pictures of my life, as I lived it.”