"Larry Clark: Fifty Years Later, Larry Returns to Tulsa" by Upasana Das

Looking at the grainy image of a boy taking a swig of alcohol while getting his shoe polished, I momentarily considered perhaps Larry Clark’s Return was not as intense like leafing through the barrage of photographs, each one as equally intense, in Tulsa (1971). Before leaving for the Vietnam War in 1964 on the cusp of adulthood, Larry and his friends in Tulsa had been sniffing the drug store inhaler Valo and taking in the amphetamine in it. Two years later, when he was back, he switched it up for heroin.

He was already familiar with the camera, with his mother being a studio photographer, and turned his lens towards his own community, who were getting high with him. This was the time when college campuses in the United States were embracing marijuana, and the journalist Tom Wolfe was following Ken Kesey and his LSD-fuelled trips in California, and heroin considered the drug of the inner city, just before Nixon’s war on drugs in the early ‘70s. Amidst it all was the utopia of the American suburbia, where supposedly everyone was ‘safe’ from all the evil in the world, beyond their segregated, white-picket fences. 

Fifty years from when it all began with Tulsa, Clark has opened up his nearly-ten-year long archive of photographs from 1962-1973, documenting the intimate lives of suburban American teenagers for his Return monograph. The eeriness of something happening creeps up gradually in the black and white pages, almost as if he were carefully making a movie. METAL sits down with Clark for eleven questions on his new book, what interests him about youth subcultures today, and how bookmaking is nearly like filmmaking.

Read full article at metalmagazine.eu.