What do you think?
Rate this book
Tulsa
When it first appeared in 1971, Larry Clark's groundbreaking book Tulsa sparked immediate controversy across the nation. Its graphic depictions of sex, violence, and drug abuse in the youth culture of Oklahoma were acclaimed by critics for stripping bare the myth that Middle America had been immune to the social convulsions that rocked America in the 1960s. The raw, haunting images taken in 1963, 1968, and 1971 document a youth culture progressively overwhelmed by self-destruction -- and are as moving and disturbing today as when they first appeared.
Originally published in a limited paperback version and republished in 1983 as a limited hardcover edition commissioned by the author, rare-book dealers sell copies of this book for more than a thousand dollars. Now in both hardcover and paperback editions from Grove Press, this seminal work of photographic art and social history is once again available to the general public.
Originally published in a limited paperback version and republished in 1983 as a limited hardcover edition commissioned by the author, rare-book dealers sell copies of this book for more than a thousand dollars. Now in both hardcover and paperback editions from Grove Press, this seminal work of photographic art and social history is once again available to the general public.
64 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1971
6 people are currently reading
1459 people want to read
About the author
Larry Clark
19 books45 followersLarry 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.
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.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 58 reviews
May 30, 2013
Amazing and haunting, this book reminds me of a memory I'm glad I don't personally possess.
January 9, 2021
Really powerful stuff. Don't think I'll ever forget the pregnant woman shooting up, or the ever so haunting image of a small baby in a coffin. No surprises to me that Larry Clark would go on to become a controversial film maker after going through this book.
December 29, 2016
These photographs left me wanting more and I am not sure if that is a good or bad thing regarding this book. A picture is worth a thousand words but in this case I feel that backstories, quotes - more information, would have given the book more value. I think these people's lives are mesmerizing, and that thought alone makes me feel far more repulsed (by myself) than the photos do. The photos make me feel sad and I do not find it strange that these photographs were seen as controversial in 1971, since there is a lot to analyze and discuss even today. I feel like not much has changed? The photos are beautiful, but they are not shocking to me personally. Having said that: I am a so-called "edgy teenager" who owns a Tumblr account, haha... Definitely worth a "flip through".
March 23, 2019
An honest look at the lives of drug abuse and the alienation of youth in America. What is so important about this work to me, is that it isn't someone outside looking in. Clark is these people, and he is photographing his friends and the life he is living while taking these photos.
More and more photography these days seems to be very opportunistic and based around social capital, but every time I read Tulsa I get the sense that this book was built with purpose. Clark himself said it wasn't meant to sit on a coffee table and collect dust, or be handed around at some yuppie gallery. It's a blood wrenching scream towards a society that is completely indifferent towards the suffering of it's youth, poor, and addicted.
Gordon Parks used to say that he chose the camera because it was a weapon against injustice. When Larry Clark finds that same weapon in his hands, he uses it adeptly and with incredible empathy.
More and more photography these days seems to be very opportunistic and based around social capital, but every time I read Tulsa I get the sense that this book was built with purpose. Clark himself said it wasn't meant to sit on a coffee table and collect dust, or be handed around at some yuppie gallery. It's a blood wrenching scream towards a society that is completely indifferent towards the suffering of it's youth, poor, and addicted.
Gordon Parks used to say that he chose the camera because it was a weapon against injustice. When Larry Clark finds that same weapon in his hands, he uses it adeptly and with incredible empathy.
August 22, 2022
The photographs in this book were taken in 1963, 1968 and 1971, but could easily have been taken yesterday. This is the true face of a nation that makes so many claims of being “the best” and sells its population a bill of goods that is nothing short of a fallacy. Drugs, guns, sex, death; all under the eyes of God and humanity—and kept deep down in the belly of the beast. But anywhere, at any given time, you can see these faces right before your eyes, in person and in living color; I know, I’ve seen them. I came of age around them. And many of them are no longer here to tell their stories, raise a family, make a living, live out their dreams. Tulsa is the hard truth; the blemished reality; the American Nightmare.
November 7, 2008
Absolutely haunting. Although its ostensibly a book of photographs (with only a few terse captions from Mr. Clark), there is still a clear and definite narrative here, and it's one of desolation and disillusionment, roughly following the course of the '60s, when these photos were shot. The bright-faced teenagers we see in the first pages are wastrels and addicts by the end, sad and almost inevitable products of the time and place they spring from, although I guess one could that this sort of small-town decay is fairly universal. And, of course, technically speaking, the photographs look pretty good, too.
June 8, 2008
A stunning collection of photographs from Larry Clark's youth in Oklahoma, shooting speed with his friends. Sets his theme of self-destructive youth in decay from the very start; beautiful and shattering.
December 21, 2023
تنها مجموعه کلارک که برایم جذاب بود
روح مکان و زمان را ثبت کرده بود
روح مکان و زمان را ثبت کرده بود
December 28, 2013
SUPER graphic, but really powerful photographs. Studies show that the average person looks at an image for 2 seconds before moving on, I believe that Larry Clark used disturbing images to compel the viewer to look longer. The photographs are like a train wreak you want to look away but you just can't.
Read
February 15, 2024Enormously disturbing.
July 2, 2024
Es fascinante y deprimente. No dice nada pero a través de las fotos uno puede ir construyendo su propia narrativa; solo quedan preguntas. Larry Clark no me simpatiza en nada, pero todo lo que hizo (en el cine y ahora que lo estoy descubriendo, en la fotografía) me encanta.
July 26, 2021
Prime black and white photography. These photos make me feel such devastating emotions.
December 25, 2020
Well. I love Larry Clark with all my heart.
The moral of Clark speaks to me. Or the lack of it. The nihilism, and the need to talk about it, which eliminates it in the first place. That's maybe the key: if you have the need to make art of the darkness, the meaninglessness, the pain, the nihilism... maybe you care about it, maybe you see that life is great, after all. And it is: without it you'd be dead. Haha.
Tulsa is a collection of pictures of a time when Clark used to shoot up as a teenager.
Once the needle goes in, it never comes out.
I think it's the purest outcome of Clark's artistic vision. He has been painting the same painting his whole life and though I love Kids and Wazzup Rockers and Bully and all the others, there's something electric and pure in this.
Very dark, nauseating and hopeless.
I've seen the originals, but holding this in my hand I feel something else. I have the need to punch a wall, to put a barrel in my mouth, to look at the sky and feel the air in my lungs.
Very inspiring.
The moral of Clark speaks to me. Or the lack of it. The nihilism, and the need to talk about it, which eliminates it in the first place. That's maybe the key: if you have the need to make art of the darkness, the meaninglessness, the pain, the nihilism... maybe you care about it, maybe you see that life is great, after all. And it is: without it you'd be dead. Haha.
Tulsa is a collection of pictures of a time when Clark used to shoot up as a teenager.
Once the needle goes in, it never comes out.
I think it's the purest outcome of Clark's artistic vision. He has been painting the same painting his whole life and though I love Kids and Wazzup Rockers and Bully and all the others, there's something electric and pure in this.
Very dark, nauseating and hopeless.
I've seen the originals, but holding this in my hand I feel something else. I have the need to punch a wall, to put a barrel in my mouth, to look at the sky and feel the air in my lungs.
Very inspiring.
July 9, 2024
The main thing is to look into the eyes of the beast and simply to remain human.
-Lina Kostenko
August 24, 2023
Very striking and upsetting images from my city in days gone by (1963-1971). There’s not a lot more Tulsan than young men shooting up amphetamine and wielding guns in front of photos of white Jesus and American flags. Okay, I’m being facetious, but the subject matter here is not at all humorous: women battered and yelled at by husbands in front of children, pregnant mothers shooting up, infants in coffins seemingly as a result of birth complications due to drugs, Asian men beaten, and Black men’s houses destroyed by police. It’s no secret that our city has dark and hidden histories but this brings it all to the surface in frightening ways.
January 11, 2015
Oh, come ON! A bunch of stupid kids shooting up and shooting each other. Stark naked truth? Okay, go shoot up and shoot yourselves, but don't get your babies involved! Go get a life. I don't feel sorry for these guys. There's so much more shocking stuff out there in the real world, you know, troops bombing innocent civilians and children dying of famine and pest and corrupt governments and bloody dictatorships and guerillas and shit like that, and THIS book touches people?
Technically speaking, though, the photos are very good.
Technically speaking, though, the photos are very good.
June 20, 2011
The raw, haunting images taken in 1963, 1968, and 1971 document a youth culture progressively overwhelmed by self-destruction.
August 30, 2011
One of the best Photo books ever made. A masterpiece.
February 20, 2012
Excellent and shocking at the same time.
April 19, 2012
"Death is more perfect than life." One of the best.
May 28, 2012
Best paired with Speed/Kentucky ham by Billy Burroughs.
September 8, 2013
like Kids, you can't look away.
April 29, 2019
Trainspotting in Oklahoma.
November 10, 2019
Jesus Christ, what happened?
January 15, 2022
Every house should have a copy.
October 5, 2022
deeply unpleasant!
October 10, 2022
I am in this book and my father is on the cover. A gritty reality of drug use and the ripple effect in the lives of families.
December 4, 2025
It's easy to see how this was shocking when it was first published, with perhaps the caveat that the people most likely to be shocked by it probably wouldn't have seen it. Now, it seems almost quaint: heroin addicts, in middle America? No! It still does do a lot to repudiate the "try that in a small town" crowd, or the notion that things were somehow better in this country 50 or 60 years ago. They weren't, and problems like drug addiction were never just the domain of big cities, implicitly populated by "those people." The sad lesson of Tulsa is that drug epidemics are basically cyclical, and will likely continue to be so in spite of our best efforts, or the lack thereof.
May 9, 2022
A Devastating Portrait of an American Tragedy.
Or one of the most beautiful book about photographs I have seen.
D'une beauté à se foutre en l'air,
D'une beauté dérangeante,
D'une beauté intense,
D'une beauté bouleversante,
D'une beauté qui fait mal,
Un mal qui ronge, qui prend par les tripes.
Les images parlent d'elles-mêmes, pas besoin de mots.
And yes, "Death is more perfect than life".
Or one of the most beautiful book about photographs I have seen.
D'une beauté à se foutre en l'air,
D'une beauté dérangeante,
D'une beauté intense,
D'une beauté bouleversante,
D'une beauté qui fait mal,
Un mal qui ronge, qui prend par les tripes.
Les images parlent d'elles-mêmes, pas besoin de mots.
And yes, "Death is more perfect than life".
January 22, 2021
I wanted more explanatory text to contextualize the photographs, but maybe it was better that there wasn’t. There’s a full newspaper review from the Detroit Free Press on the back cover that provided some of that - I read it after my first read through, then re-read the book and it made more sense.
A gift from a friend after moving here.
A gift from a friend after moving here.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 58 reviews