Larry Clark
[Photographer and filmmaker, b. 1943, Tulsa, Oklahoma, lives in New York.]
Once the needle goes in, it never comes out.
I’ve been lost a lot of times, but then I’d just get an idea and photograph it. Once I’d started, I’d know exactly what would go down and how it would end. So I just quit doing it, because it loses all interest for me when you know what’s going to happen.
I didn’t do many pictures [in the summer of 1968] because there was so much dope around. We had more than you could shoot. We lived in an apartment with some girls who were prostitutes and they had some tricks who were doctors so we had everything from liquid amphetamine to morphine pharmaceutical.
I always felt that when I was photographing, I had a psychic need to see this, to photograph this. And I think if somebody else had been doing this work, and if I could have seen these pictures anywhere at all, then there would have been no need to make them.
It’s like, I call myself a moralist and my friends fall down laughing. But it’s true! Look at the work—everyone always comments on the photo in
Tulsa of a pregnant girl shooting up, like it’s exploitative. Look at the next photo! It’s a funeral. Of a dead baby. I’m always trying to get at the consequences of actions. And if it’s titillating? Well, sometimes I’m dealing with good-looking people having sex, sure, but that’s not the point. The point is the consequences.
The one thing I wanted to do in
Tulsa was cut through the bull and tell the truth.
I wanted to present the way kids see things, but without all this baggage... You know... they’re living in the moment not thinking about anything beyond that and that’s what I wanted to catch. And I wanted the viewer to feel like you’re there with them—you can be there fucking, smoking dope, having sex.
