Return

by Larry Clark (Photographer)

Larry Clark was 16 in 1962 when he and his friends started shooting Valo - a drug store nasal inhaler that contained a tremendous amount of amphetamine.

Clark returned to his hometown of Tulsa at 20 after two years serving in Vietnam. Here he graduated from amphetamines to heroin, and upended traditional documentary photography, by turning his camera on himself and his social circle, producing a ground-breaking series of raw and intimate photographs chronicling the disintegration of the American dream.

Clark’s deeply intimate images exposed the previously unseen lives of suburban American teenagers, living a transgressive, outlaw lifestyle, hanging out in crash pads and committing burglaries and armed robberies to score dope. A small number of these photographs would come to form Tulsa, a cornerstone of contemporary photography.

50 years on, Larry Clark has returned to his archive of vintage prints, crafting a powerful vision of his work from 1962-1973, to produce his new book Return, a meticulously printed, outsized monograph, which is as shocking today as it ever has been, even in a moment in which opioid addiction is more prevalent than ever before.

72 pages, Hardcover

First published November 30, 2024

About the author

Larry Clark is an American photographer and filmmaker known for his raw and unfiltered depictions of youth culture. Often controversial, Clark’s black-and-white images unflinchingly capture overt sexuality, drug use, and violence, as seen in his iconic photobook Tulsa (1971) and his debut feature film Kids (1995). Clark is able to achieve a level of vulnerability and intimacy with his subjects. As he explains, “I am a storyteller. I've never been interested in just taking the single image and moving on. I always like to stay with the people I'm photographing for long periods of time.”

Born on January 19, 1943 in Tulsa, OK, Clark studied at a commercial photography school after working as an assistant to his mother, who worked as a portrait photographer of children. His large-scale retrospective “Kiss The Past Hello” was exhibited at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2010, and he has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Galerie Urbi et Orbi in Paris, the Taka Ishii Gallery in Tokyo, and at the International Center of Photography in New York. Clark currently lives and works between Los Angeles, CA and New York, NY. The artist’s works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland, among others.