Larry Clark’s TULSA is a collection of fifty photographs taken in Clark’s hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma over two different photographic journeys home in the 1960’s and a final shoot in 1971 precipitating the publication of the book.  It is performative, autobiographical and observatory in its nature, and one can argue that the visibility of sex, drugs and violence within the works grew from the lifestyle in which he was engrossed, to a more contrived or curated approach in the early 1970’s as Clark worked to complete his compilation for imminent publication.  His photographic chronicling of secret or double lives, outlaw drug culture of youth and young adults, and sex and firearms as related to his subjects invited a voyeuristic response from his audience with Tulsa and continued on within his future works, as did his own personal drug use.

The syntactical arrangement of his photographs is key within his works.  Any one photograph as a standalone could evoke different meanings and remove or create unintended context.  In place of a dedication, the first page with words within TULSA reads:

i was born in tulsa oklahoma 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.  L.C.

From page one of the book, the ever-present trope is the act of shooting.  Larry Clark and his photographic subjects and cohorts shoot up drugs, they shoot guns, and Clark shoots his camera.  The first two are infinitely more dangerous than the latter, but even the images speak to an uneasy and at ties tense relationship Clark has with his mirrored destruction.  A quiet violence permeates the fifty images of the book with blackened eyes, unintentional gunshot wounds, the insinuated loss of a junkie’s baby, naked vulnerable bodies being injected…these are joyless scenes.

The first photos are rich in contrast of their single subjects.  A sense of the camera being the unknown observer is established, though it diminishes as the photographs multiply.  An escalation occurs as what at first look appears to merely be gritty stripped down portraits of lower economic class young adults goes even darker.  Melancholia is emphasized through the high contrast, grainy images.  There is a stifling sense of containment within the tight, invasive spaces in which the subjects are shot, amplifying and elevating the voyeuristic sense thrust upon the viewer, yet circumventing the feel of becoming an inconvenient peeping Tom. Less than a dozen photographs into the collection the first needle finds arm.  There are two subjects in the image, with the one on the right looking up and off far right of the photographer towards the light as he acts as tourniquet for the subject on the left side of the image over whom’s shoulder the moment is captured as he shoots up.  Their dark clothing and hair bleed into the shadows in striking contrast to pale hand and highlighted face of helper and the  clenched fist of user.  They continue on in the same vein –quite literally as anguish is captured.  The rawness is deeply visceral.

The image 15 (neither pages nor images are numbered.  This is from a count done from a scanned copy of the hardcover book) is shot from the backseat in a car.  The composition of the image adds the idea of inside versus outside and begs the question as to the role of photographer as observer, participant or director. He photographed issues pertinent then and applicable to contemporary times, as well, while indexing the subculture in which he engaged.  In an article titled “Life and Death in ‘Tulsa’ Larry Clark’s photos show a city at war with itself,” the author, Mason Whitehorn Powell, discusses the acquisition of Clark’s Tulsa portfolio at auction for the Philbrook Museum of Tulsa with their curator of modern and contemporary art, Sienna Brown.  Brown states, “It’s because of the same issues of alienation, drug abuse, violence, but also the way he photographs feels so contemporary because he has that ‘part of the inner circle’ but also a cool detachment that he’s constantly playing against, which after his portfolio became a really important art movement,” Brown said. “There are so many artists that can’t exist without Larry Clark’s start. Someone like Nan Goldin, Robert Maplethorpe, Catherine Opie, all of them photographed subcultures which they were a part of and did it in this way that is raw and intimate at the same time.”  It took almost 50 years for the institution to acknowledge Clark as part of their landscape, bringing his work in as an artifact to their region and past, documenting and preserving the underbelly so many would like to ignore and keep behind closed doors even today.

The framing of Larry Clark’s images for TULSA was where the majority of his work was done.  Perusing the book gives the viewer the impression that these are flashes caught in time with little orchestration.  Further inspection provides evidence that some images are staged with time and effort taken to prioritize lighting of the subjects.  In Clark’s own words in an interview done for a&u America’s Aids Magazine, he discusses his influences as being classic photographers such as Walker Evans and Harry Callahan.  He continues on to say, “I’m using the play of light for drama with classic composition. I’m using what Henri Cartier-Bresson called the “decisive moment”; but more than that I’m trying to make the people look good, like movie stars because they were my friends. And I’m photographing them in the most intimate moments of their lives and then showing them the pictures so if they don’t look good, then they’re not going to like me taking the pictures, right?”

Then Clark’s work really began once in the darkroom.  In the book Darkroom, Clark states, “I do a lot of burning and dodging when making a print and then use bleach.  There’s not a straight print in the TULSA book.  When I’m photographing I always try to shoot against the light. The film can’t handle this and everything gets burned up, since I’m exposing it for the shadows.” That’s not to say he wasn’t working in the moment.  Clark has said that he did not begin shooting up until after the first year of photographs, meaning that the majority of photographs taken after that first year were take while he was in the throes of his own addiction.

There is an apparent unravelling which occurs in the book following the insertion of more text at the halfway point.  “death is more perfect than life” is the left page compliment to the image also found on the cover of the book of his friend sitting shirtless on the bed with gun raised casually up towards the ceiling with the label “dead 1970” beneath.  The photographs which follow the midpoint infer latent violence with the more prominent presence of firearms and repercussive events: a crude note to the police, an accidental gunshot wound, a woman with a blackened eye and another woman mid-argument and cornered in a bathroom with a finger jabbing towards her chest, the iconic image of a topless woman with her head cropped off straddling a man as he shoots drugs into her arm, and a pregnant woman shooting up, while the light from the window floods over her.  What follows are images from a funeral and/or wake with a newborn baby in an open coffin.  The informant comes after six photographs documenting the beating of a man.

The ethics of a project like TULSA are questionable.  The project he undertook afterwards, Teenage Lust, treaded into even murkier water as he documented his own coming of age through photographs of  teenagers engaging in both drug use and graphic underage sexual activity.  None of the scrutiny has prevented his works from finding their way into the Whitney, the Museum of Photographic Arts, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.  Larry Clark has never been a stranger to controversy, and his chosen approach has only ever been slowed by his own lifelong battle with drug addiction.  He has made a successful career out of his biggest adversity.  He has lent a voice to the voiceless, indelible images to subculture and found an outlet for his trauma.  Larry Clark’s life has been both a cautionary tale and an inspiring one.

**the images for TULSA were incomplete in the Google Drive archive.  I found a scanned copy of the book here, but with no information to cite. https://imgur.com/gallery/N5AKP