FROM AMERICAN SUBURBS X

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Larry Clark on Cutting through the Bullshit and Hypocrisy of America (2007)

By Raphaël Cuir, originally published in Art Press, August 2007

A year ago, seven short films by Marina Abramovic, Matthew Barney, Gaspar Noé, Richard Prince, Marco Brambilla, Sam Taylor-Wood and Larry Clark were shown at Cannes under the title Destricted. The idea of producers Mel Agace and Neville Wakefield was to deal “explicitly” with sexuality, and so blur the boundaries between art and pornography. The films go on general release in France this spring (April 25) and a DVD is due in October. Here was a perfect reason for making an old dream come true and meeting up with Larry Clark, whose short is definitely the most graphic of the seven.(1)

While the images from Larry Clark’s Tulsa series (1963 – 1971) may have lost some of their subversive edge over the last forty-odd years, they remain as intense as ever. Clark always claims that there is a price, an emotional price to be paid for such violence. In the past, this meant the return of the repressed, the other side of the American dream (some people still haven’t got over it). Today, still, it means opening “the whole of human nature to consciousness of the self” (Bataille). 

And, since “we cannot know what the body is capable of” (Spinoza), we must explore, and there are many surprises ahead of us (Nietzsche: “What’s amazing is the body”). Adolescence is a key moment in this exploration; it is when an individual discovers the possibilities offered by physical maturity. The physical omnipotence of teenagers, who balk at nothing but do not always measure the consequences of their acts, is at the heart of Clark’s concerns. How lives change, get trapped, slip away from themselves, how they avoid the worst, how, at each moment, our acts engage our responsibility, condition our lives, and what the world does with us—that is what Clark’s films home in on. Clark himself has looked deep into the abyss, and though he has stepped back from the edge he continues to show us what is there—what regards us there. He has chosen to exhibit the “brutality” of facts (Michel Leiris), but in the intimacy and the density of the moment preserved forever on film. Forty years on, Clark’s first images continue to remind us that the abyss is within us (Victor Hugo). His Kids is already a classic.

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An Interview with Larry Clark: “If It’s Part of Life, It’s (Not) Pornography” >>>

Photography

Clark rose to prominence with his groundbreaking 1971 photo book, Tulsa. The project, which documented his own social circle of friends in Oklahoma engaging in drug use, sex, and violence, shattered the then-prevailing myths about the innocence of Middle American youth.

• Key Works:

  • Tulsa (1971): A seminal work of subjective documentary photography. It provided a stark, unfiltered view of addiction, capturing the trajectory of his friends from youth into profound alienation.

  • Teenage Lust (1983): An "autobiography" of his past, bridging his own history with new subjects, including young male hustlers in New York City.

  • The Perfect Childhood (1993): A photographic essay that further examined the intersection of media, adolescent identity, and the darker side of youth.

His photographic style is noted for its voyeuristic intimacy—Clark often positioned himself as an active participant rather than a distant observer. This approach has influenced generations of photographers, from Nan Goldin to Ryan McGinley, who also adopted confessional and immersion-based techniques.

Filmmaking

In the 1990s, Clark translated his photographic sensibilities into independent cinema. His films often focus on "at-risk" youth, skateboarding culture, and the often-ignored consequences of the lifestyles he documents.

• Key Films:

  • Kids (1995): Written by Harmony Korine, this debut feature garnered immediate notoriety and acclaim. It captured a 24-hour period in the lives of New York City skateboarders and remains a polarizing, iconic piece of 90s indie cinema.

  • Another Day in Paradise (1998): A darker, crime-focused exploration of addicts living on the margins.

  • Bully (2001) & Ken Park (2003): These films pushed his examination of teen violence and suburban isolation to even more explicit extremes.

  • Wassup Rockers (2005): A departure from his more nihilistic work, this film focuses on a group of young Latino skateboarders from South Central Los Angeles navigating the complexities of race and cultural identity.

Core Themes and Influence

Clark’s work consistently circles back to a few central tensions:

• The Myth of Adolescence: He consistently challenges the societal "sanitization" of youth, focusing instead on the reality of alienation, boredom, and self-destruction.

• The Participant-Observer: Because he was often a part of the subcultures he documented (such as the drug scene in Tulsa or the skateboarding scenes in New York and LA), his work possesses an authenticity that often unnerves mainstream audiences.

• Marginalization: From teenage hustlers to kids in rural Oklahoma, Clark is drawn to those living outside the bounds of conventional family and societal structures.

Cover of Tulsa (1963-1971) by Larry Clark

Tulsa (1971) is widely considered one of the most influential and controversial photo books of the 20th century. It marked a definitive shift in documentary photography, moving away from the "objective" or "decisive moment" style popularized by figures like Henri Cartier-Bresson and toward a raw, subjective, and intensely personal form of visual storytelling.

The Project

Shot between 1963 and 1971, the book documents Clark’s own circle of friends in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Rather than documenting these individuals from the outside, Clark was an active, equal participant in their lives.

• Subject Matter: The photographs depict a group of young people—including the photographer himself—who were deeply entrenched in a cycle of amphetamine abuse, gun culture, casual sex, and profound alienation.

• The Aesthetic: The images are grainy, high-contrast, and often chaotic. Because Clark used a camera he was comfortable with, the subjects rarely seem to notice the lens. This lack of self-consciousness creates an uncomfortable intimacy for the viewer.

• Narrative Flow: Unlike many photo essays of the time that relied on captions for context, Tulsa is structured to read like a narrative. It documents the trajectory of the group—beginning with the initial allure of the lifestyle and ending in the physical and mental degradation that followed.

Why It Matters

Tulsa shattered the prevailing, sanitized image of the American teenager in the 1960s. By focusing on the "lost" youth of the heartland rather than the political protest movements of the era, Clark forced the art world to confront a side of American life that was often ignored.

• Confessional Photography: Clark is often credited with helping invent "confessional" or "autobiographical" photography. His work paved the way for future artists like Nan Goldin, who would later document her own social circles in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency with a similar focus on addiction, love, and community.

• The Participant-Observer: His work challenged the ethical boundaries of photography. By documenting his friends' criminal behavior and substance abuse without intervening, he raised persistent questions about the role of the artist: Is the photographer a witness, a facilitator, or an exploiter?

Legacy

At the time of its release, Tulsa was largely met with shock and revulsion by mainstream critics, yet it became an underground sensation among artists and photographers. It essentially functioned as the blueprint for Clark’s later transition into filmmaking. The visual language established in Tulsa—the focus on disaffected youth, the obsession with the iconography of delinquency (guns, drugs, tattoos), and the sense of impending doom—would become the visual and thematic bedrock of his feature films, particularly Kids.

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Transition to Cinema

In the early 1990s, after directing a music video for Chris Isaak, Clark transitioned into feature films, bringing his raw, documentary-style aesthetic to the moving image.

Kids (1995)

Written by a then-teenage Harmony Korine, Clark's directorial debut followed a group of New York City skaters over 24 hours. The film was notorious for its raw depiction of underage sex and the HIV/AIDS crisis, launching the careers of Chloë Sevigny, Rosario Dawson, and Leo Fitzpatrick.

Later Works

Clark continued to explore themes of alienated youth in films like Bully (2001), based on a true murder story, and Ken Park (2002), which was banned in several countries due to its graphic sexual content. Later films, such as Wassup Rockers and Marfa Girl, moved toward a more improvisational and observational style.

The transition from still photography to film for Larry Clark was not a pivot away from his roots, but rather an expansion of his methodology. By the early 1990s, Clark felt he had exhausted what the still frame could convey about the "lived reality" of American youth. He wanted to capture not just the static, iconic moments of rebellion, but the duration of life on the margins—the boredom, the aimless wandering, and the specific cadence of conversations among teenagers.

The Catalyst: Kids (1995)

The primary catalyst for his transition was his partnership with the young Harmony Korine. Clark had been looking to tell a narrative story about the skateboarding subculture he had been observing, but he struggled to find a script that captured the authentic vernacular of the youth.

When he encountered Korine’s writing, he found a voice that matched his own photographic perspective. Together, they realized that to achieve the same "verité" feel as his photography, they had to apply a specific set of rules to the filmmaking process.

Stylistic Continuity: The "Clarkian" Aesthetic

Clark effectively "filmed" his movies the same way he shot his photographs. He treated the camera not as a director’s tool for framing and lighting, but as a witness. Several key stylistic choices made the jump from Tulsa to Kids:

• Non-Professional Actors (Street Casting): Just as his photographic subjects were his actual friends, his film subjects were largely non-actors. In Kids, he cast real skaters and teenagers from the streets of New York. By using kids who were playing versions of themselves, he eliminated the "acting" that often creates a barrier between the viewer and the subject.

• The "Fly-on-the-Wall" Camera: His films prioritize a voyeuristic, observational style. The camera often lingers on moments that are technically "unnecessary" for plot advancement—kids sitting around, skating, or engaging in mundane banter. This mimics the pacing of his photo books, where the narrative is built through accumulation rather than traditional climax.

• Aversion to Moralizing: Clark never attempted to "explain" or "judge" his subjects in his photography, and he maintained this in his films. He presented the drug use, sexual activity, and delinquency without the typical framing of a "public service announcement." He simply documented the environment, leaving the viewer to wrestle with the morality of what they were witnessing.

Why the Shift?

In an interview context, Clark often spoke about the limitations of the still image. He noted that in a photograph, you can frame out the context, but in film, you are forced to confront the passage of time.

For Clark, the transition was about:

1. Immediacy: Capturing the energy and movement of the skateboarding and street scenes that a static image couldn't fully contain.

2. Sound: Integrating the raw, often incoherent, and aggressive language of the youth he was documenting.

3. The "Long Form" Portrait: Moving from a single, jarring image (Tulsa) to a sustained, uncomfortable immersion into a character's life (Kids, Bully).

By moving to film, he was able to place the audience directly inside the subcultures he had spent decades observing from the periphery, forcing the viewer to inhabit the space alongside his subjects rather than merely looking at them from the pages of a book.

Year	Title	Role	Notes
1995	Kids	Director	Screenplay by Harmony Korine
1998	Another Day in Paradise	Director	Stars James Woods and Melanie Griffith
2001	Bully	Director	Based on the murder of Bobby Kent
2002	Teenage Caveman	Director	TV Movie for Cinemax's Creature Features
2002	Ken Park	Director	Co-directed with Edward Lachman; banned in several countries
2005	Wassup Rockers	Director, Writer	Focuses on Latino skaters in South Central LA
2006	Destricted	Director	Segment: 'Impaled'
2012	Marfa Girl	Director, Writer	Won the Marcus Aurelius Award at Rome Film Fest
2014	The Smell of Us	Director, Writer	Set among skaters in Paris
2018	Marfa Girl 2	Director, Writer	Sequel to the 2012 film
2021	The Kids	Subject	Documentary directed by Eddie Martin

CARLO MOLLINO: "POLAROIDS 1962-1973">>>

In a career that spanned more than four decades, Carlo Mollino designed buildings, homes, furniture, cars, aircraft. One of the most dashing figures of mid-century Italy, Mollino was famed for his design finesse and his elegant organicism. In 1949 he published an important book on photography: Message from the Darkroom. Sometime around 1960, he began to seek out women—mostly dancers—in his native Turin, inviting them to his villa for late-night modeling sessions. The models would pose against extraordinary backdrops, designed by Mollino, in clothing, wigs and accessories that he had carefully selected. Finally, having printed the Polaroids, Mollino would painstakingly amend them with an extremely fine brush, to at- tain his idealized vision of the female form. The 1200 pictures remained a secret until after his death, in 1973.

Carlo Mollino (1905–1973) stands as one of the 20th century’s most enigmatic polymaths. An architect, designer, photographer, writer, and daredevil enthusiast, he resisted easy categorization, existing on the fringes of the Italian Modern Movement while forging a deeply personal, surrealist aesthetic.

The Visionary Polymath

Born in Turin, Mollino approached his work with the mindset of a Renaissance man. He rejected the cold, standardized functionalism favored by many of his contemporaries, opting instead for an "aerodynamic surrealism." His work was characterized by a synthesis of nature, technology, and art—he frequently drew inspiration from organic forms (the curve of a human body, animal horns, or tree branches) and integrated them into his designs.

Architecture and Interior Design

Though his built legacy is relatively small—amounting to about ten major architectural projects—each is considered a masterwork of space and form.

• Design Philosophy: He viewed interiors as cinematic sets. Apartments like Casa Miller and Casa Mollino were meticulously crafted, theatrical spaces designed for specific moods or as backdrops for his photography.

• Notable Projects: His work includes the Turin Equestrian Association (1937, demolished 1960), the Lago Nero ski lodge (1948), and the Teatro Regio in Turin (1973), which remains one of his most iconic public architectural achievements.

• Furniture: Mollino’s furniture—often unique, limited-edition pieces—is highly coveted by collectors today. His designs, such as the Arabesque table (1959) or the Ardea armchair (1944), often utilized bentwood technology to achieve fluid, biomorphic shapes that mimic sculptural forms rather than traditional industrial utility.

The Secret Life of a Photographer

Photography was perhaps Mollino's most intimate medium, serving as a repository for his private desires and aesthetic experiments.

• Surrealist Roots: Early in his career, he experimented with photomontages and surrealist techniques that recalled the work of Man Ray.

• The Polaroids: For over two decades, Mollino secretly produced thousands of Polaroids of women in his private apartments. These images, which only gained widespread attention posthumously, were highly staged. He acted as the photographer, stylist, and set designer, dressing his models and arranging the environment with the same meticulous care he applied to his architecture. These works blurred the line between pin-up, art portraiture, and architectural sketch.

A Legacy of Eccentricity

Mollino’s life outside of art was equally flamboyant; he was an avid skier, aerobatic pilot, and race car designer (notably the Bisiluro, which he raced at Le Mans in 1955). This cross-pollination of interests is what defines his legacy. He did not separate his life from his work; rather, he infused his technical skills as an engineer with the soul of an artist to create a "Turinese Baroque" that remains distinct in the history of design

THOMAS RUFF - "NUDES">>>

The Architect of the Image

Thomas Ruff (born 1958) is a central figure of the Düsseldorf School of Photography. Having studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher, he eventually moved beyond their "straight" documentary style to deconstruct the "grammar of photography"—investigating how images are constructed, distributed, and perceived.

1. Key Conceptual Series

Porträts (1980s–1990s)

Ruff’s most famous body of work features expressionless peers photographed like passport IDs.

• Scale: In 1986, he began printing these at a monumental scale (over 2 meters high).

• Effect: The massive size forces a confrontation with the physical surface (pores, iris patterns) while maintaining a psychological distance, challenging the idea that a portrait reveals a subject's "soul."

Sterne (1989–1992)

Ruff stopped using a camera for this series, instead acquiring archival negatives from the European Southern Observatory.

• Appropriation: By selecting and enlarging specific details of the night sky, he transformed scientific data into abstract art, highlighting his interest in the "image of the image."

nudes (1999–present)

Ruff explored the internet's impact on visual culture by downloading low-resolution pornographic thumbnails.

• Technique: He enlarged these, causing extreme pixelation and blurring. The images become painterly color fields, forcing focus on the digital structure and the voyeuristic nature of consumption.

jpegs (2004–2007)

This series investigates "artifacting" in digital compression.

• The Grid: He enlarged images of cataclysms or landscapes until the JPEG compression grid became visible. From a distance, they appear representational; up close, they dissolve into a grid of colored squares.

Photograms (2012–present)

Reimagining the classic darkroom technique virtually, Ruff uses custom-designed software to simulate light on paper. These are "camera-less" images created entirely in a digital environment.

2. Legacy and Impact

Ruff’s contribution lies in his skepticism of photographic authenticity. He famously stated, "Most of the photos we come across today are no longer really authentic." By using everything from police composite machines to NASA satellite data, he proves that a photograph is a highly constructed surface reflecting technological and cultural biases.

Notable Collections

• K20, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf

• Whitechapel Gallery, London

• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

• Tate Modern, London

Porn and the shadow side of paradise: Thomas Ruff's Nudes >>>