Larry Clark was born in 1943 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he came into photography at an early age. His mother was a baby photographer, and he started working in the business from the age of 13. But the innocence would not last.
In 1962, Clark was 16 when he and his friends started shooting Valo, a drug store nasal inhaler that contained a large amount of amphetamine. He left Oklahoma to study photography and then served two years in the Vietnam war. But then he came back to Tulsa.
“I shot with my friends everyday for three years and then left town but I’ve gone back through the years,” he wrote in his highly celebrated book Tulsa, published in 1971. “Once the needle goes in it never comes out.”
When Clark returned home to Tulsa at the age of 20, he had graduated from amphetamines to heroin.
The stark, grainy black and white photographs Clark produced show a side of America that many at the time did not realize existed. They are young people wearing the clothes and hairstyles common for the time period. They for the most part could be anybody in middle America. They could have been neighbors, people you saw at the grocery store, or at the movies.
But they are drug addicts. And Clark’s friends. You see the needles, many of them, as they shot up themselves, or inject others. They are scenes that are intimate, and private even, yet beautiful in their own way. It is a look into addiction that very few see.
“I’ve always been interested in small groups of marginalized people who no one would know about otherwise. 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,” says photographer Larry Clark. “You see us from the time we were teenagers up until our twenties and how everything changed and how we changed. There weren’t supposed to be drugs back then. It was supposed to be mom’s apple pie and white picket fences. When I started making work, I said, ‘Why can’t you show everything?'”
There is no text in the book to explain them. The photographs are left to stand on their own, for the viewer to explore. They are scenes without context, but one doesn’t need text to explain what you are seeing: young people caught up in the vicious cycle of addiction that comes to dominate the life of a drug addict to the detriment of everything else.
And in many ways, the photographs mirror the opioid epidemic that has been burning through the United States today. The addicts are in many ways the same. They could be anyone.
These young women and men might not be what you think of when you think of an addict. They are people you see every day, all around you, but most people don’t see what happens behind closed doors. The addiction is still there. And the needles still go in. And lives are changed for it.
Larry Clark’s Return is published by Stanley/Barker and can be purchased through their website here.
