RETURN – LARRY CLARK

RETURN – LARRY CLARK

 

Published by Stanley/Barker, 2024 

Hardcover, pages

X cm

Language: English

Condition:

 

Return is Larry Clark's powerful revisitation of his early photographic work, capturing the raw, unfiltered lives of suburban American teenagers from 1962 to 1973. Through a deeply intimate lens, Clark exposes a hidden world of youth living on the edge—engaging in transgressive lifestyles marked by drug use, burglaries, and armed robberies, all in pursuit of their next fix.

 

Larry Clark was 16 years old in 1962 when he and his friends began using Valo, a nasal inhaler containing a large amount of amphetamines. After leaving Oklahoma to study photography in New York and serving two years in Vietnam, Clark returned to Tulsa, where he transitioned from amphetamines to heroin. It was here that his photographic practice began, overturning the documentary tradition of the time. Clark turned the camera on himself and his circle of friends, producing a series of raw and intimate photographs that captured the disintegration of the American Dream.

This book reflects Clark's return to his archive, recontextualizing his groundbreaking images that once shocked audiences in Tulsa (1971). Fifty years later, Return reaffirms the relevance and impact of Clark's vision, particularly in an era where opioid addiction remains a pervasive crisis. His photographs, simultaneously beautiful and unsettling, chronicle the disintegration of the American Dream, offering an unvarnished look at life within a secretive, marginalized subculture.

 

As Clark himself stated:
"I photographed my friends over a ten-year period in this secret world that nobody else could have possibly come in and done except someone from the inside like me. You see us from the time we were teenagers up until our twenties and how everything changed and how we changed."

 

Return is a masterful continuation of Clark's legacy, showcasing the enduring power of his work to provoke, challenge, and deeply move viewers.