‘There weren’t supposed to be drugs back then. It was supposed to be mom’s apple pie and white picket fences.”
– Larry Clark on drugs, outsiders and “a record of his secret teenage life.” in suburban America
When director and photographer Larry Clark (born January 19, 1943) returned home from Vietnam he continued to photograph his close friends and their drug use. Drafted into the US Army, from 1964 to 1965, Clark served in the Vietnam War in a unit that supplied ammunition to units fighting in the north.
Larry Clark was 16 in 1962, when he and his friends started shooting a drug store nasal inhaler that contained speed. When he returned home from Vietnam, he took heroin.
A number of these photographs would come to form Tulsa (1971), the photobook’s name taken from the place of his birth. As Clark writes: “I was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1943. When I was 16, I started shooting amphetamine. I shot with my friends every day for three years and then left town, but I’ve gone back through the years. Once the needle goes in, it never comes out.”
“I photographed my friends over a 10-year period, in this secret world, which nobody else could have come in and done. You see us from the time we were teenagers up until our 20s. And how we changed”
– Larry Clark
“I took this photo in a diner we would go to often. It was one of the few public places that we would frequent during that time”
– Larry Clark
‘There weren’t supposed to be drugs back then. It was supposed to be mom’s apple pie and white picket fences. When I started making work, I said: “Why can’t you show everything?”’
– Larry Clark
“I’ve always been interested in small groups of marginalised people who no one would know about otherwise”
– Larry Clark
‘This is a picture of Billy and his baby, Shantelle [above]. She still texts me whenever someone from the old gang dies, or if they get together to celebrate. She’s one of the only people from Tulsa that I still hear from regularly”
– Larry Clark
“When someone I knew would die, which happened a lot, I’d think they were one of the lucky ones,” he told me. “I honestly used to think I was cursed to stay on earth and make photographs.”
– Larry Clark, 2014
You can see more of Clark’s work that blurs the lines between voyeurism and reportage, between truth and exploitation in Return is published by Stanley/Barker. All photos: Larry Clark
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