Return Larry Clark - 0fr.

Size : 330 x 245 mm

Hardcover

72 pages

black and white

Published by Stanley/Barker

In 1962, at 16, Larry Clark and his friends started shooting Bop (a drugstore nasal inhaler). He then served two years in Vietnam and returned to his hometown of Tulsa at 20. Here, he transitioned from amphetamines to heroin and subverted conventional documentary photography. He turned his camera on himself and his social circle, producing a groundbreaking series of raw and intimate photographs that documented the collapse of the American Dream.

Clark's profoundly intimate photographs exposed the previously unseen lives of suburban American teenagers. These young people led an invasive, outlaw lifestyle, hanging out in crash pads to get drugs, and committing robberies and armed holdups. Some of these photographs would form "Tulsa," a cornerstone of contemporary photography. Fifty years later, Larry Clark revisited his archive of vintage prints and created a powerful vision of his work from 1962 to 1973, producing "Return," a meticulously printed oversized monograph.

"I've always been interested in the small groups of people who are marginalized, whom no one else knows. I photographed my friends over a decade in a secret world that no one but an insider like me could enter. From our teenage years into our twenties, and how everything changed and how we changed. There weren't supposed to be any drugs back then. It was supposed to be all apple pie and white picket fences. When I started making my work, I said, 'Why can't I show everything?'"