Larry Clark

Larry Clark – A youth full of drugs, sex, and photographs

Larry Clark was born on 19 January 1943. His mother was a roaming baby photographer without fixed address, and so he came into contact with photography at an early age, developing such a considerable talent in this field that at the age of 13 he was helping his mother with her work. His father was a travelling salesman for books and magazines and was rarely at home, so Larry Clark was often alone and had plenty of time for questionable experiments: He injected amphetamine in 1959 for the first time, together with his friends. He was generally not averse to trying drugs and sex and had many experiences which would later shape his artistic work. He took many photographs documenting youth’s intoxication – Larry Clark once said photography and drugs were mutually dependent. Without drugs, these pictures would not have been taken, but without the pictures, he would not have survived the drugs. 

Unsparing documentation of social debris landscapes

Larry Clark attended the Layton School of Art in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he was taught by Gerhard Bakker and Walter Sheffer. With his eye on a career as freelance artist, he moved to New York, but was called up for military service after two months – in the mid-1960s, he supplied the fighting units in Vietnam with ammunition. The madness of the war prompted him to make public other madnesses and in 1971 his first photo book, Tulsa, was published in which he documented the drug excesses of his friends in disturbing black and white photographs. By that time, he had already been documenting the grey reality of American suburban life with his camera for eight years. What Larry Clark saw – and photographed – disturbed the public and was a starting point for his career as an internationally renowned chronicler of social abysses, of the youth milieu in particular. In the photo book Teenage Lust, published in 1983, he showed the uninhibited sexuality of his own youth interspersed with family photos and portraits of New York hustlers. 

A cinematic work that disturbs and provokes

Larry Clark reached particular international fame through his controversial films which show the destroyed lives of young people from socially precarious backgrounds just as openly and unsparingly as his photographs. He created the film Kids together with the screenwriter Harmony Korine which caused great public controversy in 1995 and is still his most famous work to date, whilst the much-acclaimed films Bully, Ken Park and Teenage Caveman were created within a matter of months in the year 2001. With his raw pictorial language, Larry Clark has influenced celebrated directors such as Martin Scorsese and Gus Van Sant. Clark himself never quite escaped the pull of drugs, although he insists that he is always clean during filming. In 2002, he was arrested by the police for breaking a business partner’s nose during an argument about Israel and the Middle East. Larry Clark has received prizes and awards for his work from renowned film festivals in Cognac, Stockholm and Rome.