Larry Clark

Larry Clark is one of the most important names in the history of photography. His first project, published as the well-known photo book Tulsa (1971), was groundbreaking with its raw, grainy images depicting the life of young Americans on the edge of society.
The pictures, taken during Clark’s youth in Tulsa, Oklahoma, balance on the precipice between documentary, the voyeuristic and the confessional. With a number of other photographers and filmmakers, including Nan Goldin and Gus Van Sant, who, like Clark, used the camera as a means of survival, his work formed a school. His focus has always been on documenting subcultures such as surfers, punks or skateboarders. To give the images authenticity he needs to understand and be part of the culture he depicts.
Clark’s mother worked as a baby photographer and from the age of 13 he was her assistant. He then went on to study photography for two years. However, Clark was not a photographer searching for a documentary project; he simply documented the life he himself was living in Tulsa in the 1960s and
70s. He first became dependent on drugs when he was 16 and over a period of seven years he immortalized, sometimes with unbearable honesty, a life filled with parties, drugs, sex, crime and violence. It was a teenage culture that failed to match the contemporary image of The Young Americans.

In the 1990s Clark began to develop narrative qualities in his photography and progressed from still to moving images. His first film, KIDS, a coming-of-age film set in New York City during the 1990s, hit the screens in 1995. In it we follow a group of young people through a day of skateboarding, partying and sex. The script was written by the then 16 year-old Harmony Korine, and it was his first film too. The cast was made up of amateurs yet the film became the breakthrough for the now established actors Chloë Sevigny and Rosario Dawson.
The film’s documentary style and raw content attracted a great deal of attention and shook both the film world and society at large. Is this really how young people are living today? Opinion was divided – The New York Times called it “A wake-up call to the modern world” while others condemned it as pornography in the guise of a documentary. The film's focus on skateboard culture helped launch street and lifestyle brands that are now global multi-million dollar industries, such as Supreme, Zoo York and others.

Larry Clark is represented by the Simon Lee Gallery in London and the Luhring Augustine Gallery in New York City. Many of the motifs included in this auction can also be found in the images in the collections of Moderna Museet in Stockholm, most recently on display in 2009 in the exhibition ‘Back to Reality’.
Clark’s pictures are also in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Additionally, Yale University and Cornell University have acquired pictures by Larry Clark.