Larry Clark, born in Tulsa, worked in his family’s commercial photographic portrait business before studying photography with Walter Sheffer at the Layton School of Art in Milwaukee. Clark served in the military during the Vietnam War and has been a freelance photographer based in New York since 1966. During the 1960s, Clark documented the culture of drug use and illicit activity of his friends in Tulsa, and his photographs from those years were published as Tulsa in 1971. Considered shocking for its graphic portrayal of the intimate details of its subjects’ risky lives, the book launched Clark’s career. After Tulsa, he produced Teenage Lust in 1983, a series of photographs depicting adolescent sexuality and The Perfect Childhood. His work has been included in group and solo exhibitions since the early 1970s, and was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Photographers’ Fellowship in 1973 and a Creative Arts Public Service photographers’ grant in 1980. Clark has also produced films; Kids (1994), based on his experiences with New York City teenagers and their culture of drugs, alcohol, and sex.

Larry Clark’s photographs in Tulsa are unflinching and portrays a difficult and often unsightly circumstances viewed through a participant’s eyes. Their first hand intensity, recollects the work of Danny Lyon and Bruce Davidson, but Clark’s raw voyeurism and insistent exposure of detail results in a apprehensiveness that differentiates his work from that of others in the early 1970s.