Larry Clark
Photograph by Larry Clark
An intimate and harrowing study of the transgressive lifestyle adopted by his own immediate circle of suburban teenagers, Larry Clark’s Tulsa was a shock to the system of picket-fence America when it was released in 1971. “This is not a picture book that will lie quietly and without protest on coffee tables,” observed Dick Cheverton in a review for The Detroit Free Press, published at the time under the moniker A Devastating Portrait of an American Tragedy. “Nor is this book easy to pick up, confront, challenge. For this is a collection of photographs that assail, lacerate, devastate. And ultimately indict.”
“This was not the image of America that people were interested in portraying,” says the controversial photographer and filmmaker over email. “At the time, it was all about selling this idea that everything was like a Norman Rockwell painting. This was what I was witnessing though, and I thought it was important to show a more realistic viewpoint of the world.” Made in 1963, 1968 and 1971, around his move to New York (1964) and subsequent deployment to Vietnam (1964-65), after which he returned to his hometown, the pictures foreground drug abuse and the surrounding culture (mainly guns and sex), of which Clark himself was a part: experimenting with amphetamines at 16, he’d graduated to heroin by the age of 20.
Because of its outlaw-adjacent subjects, the series was difficult to get published until the photographer Ralph Gibson, a friend of Clark’s, stepped in; Danny Seymour, whose own photobook A Loud Song preceded it, footed the bill. “Once we had put out Tulsa, it was flying off the shelves,” recalls Clark. “I think it sold out in maybe two days, something like that. Once that happened, it made sense to keep photographing the things I was interested in, as it seemed others were also interested in seeing those things.”
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