LARRY CLARK: “Larry Clark’s Memory”

By Megan Bradley, first published in Volume 3 of the Concordia

Undergraduate Journal of Art History

Memory is largely based on lived experience. We remember important events

that mark the passage of time, and as we get further away from those events
our memories may be distorted; we lose details and make additions along the
way. When we see or hear about other people’s experiences they may
influence what we believe to be our own past. This paper aims to work through
situations of real and imagined memories, focusing on adolescence, a time
where we begin to discover who we are. The work of Larry Clark is inextricably
linked to memory, memory of both his own past and of the pasts of his
audiences. He takes pictures of messed up kids, makes movies about messed
up kids and was and, arguably, still is one of those messed up kids, his pictures
and films allowing him to exist in a perpetual world of adolescence. His
disturbing and ominous film Kids (1995) features end-of-millennium teenagers
doing what he did in his own teenage era, causing viewers to project their own
selves onto Clark’s imagery because what Clark makes use of is a commonality
among all of his viewers: adolescence, in that everyone that sees his work has
had one. In looking at the two mediums—film and photography—that Clark uses
to express his visual language, I will show how Clark ultimately adopts the more
constructed narrative of cinema as he gets further away from his own
adolescence to create hyper-realistic visions of the subcultural adolescent
groups to which he can no longer be a member. I will look to Clark’s
photographic novel Tulsa, his film Kids, and an untitled photographic still from
Kids in order to discuss the effects of his visual language.

Tulsa (1963-1971) is a series of photographs that portray Clark’s social milieu in

his hometown. Tulsa functions like a diary for Clark, in which he includes
images of himself and his friends engaging in the “everyday” activities of drug
use, violence and sex. The shock value of the series was high at the time that
Clark published it and remains so. Images from Tulsa still resonate within the
viewer as the evidence of a lost generation of messed up kids. A second
photographic novel, Teenage Lust (1983), depicted another generation of youth
that replaced that of Clark and his friends. The Tulsa images are, in a sense,
doubled by the younger brothers and sisters of his friends emulating their older
siblings. As Clark’s original subjects slowly slip into adulthood or die along the
way, Clark maintains his adolescence by picking up with a new set of young
ones. Richard Baxstrom and Todd Meyers state that the characters in Clark’s
films occupy a space of otherness, and this “otherness is rooted in adolescence
as the moment of failing to become human or worse, succumbing to a proper
humanity rooted in stasis, immobility and the inability to overcome the
paradoxes of human existence.”[1] I would argue that Clark, like his characters,
tries to live in between these two options, attempting to avoid stasis by
constantly re-creating his past in the present. His compassion for the lost
generation is spurred by his desire to nevernot be a part of it, and his work is
demonstrative of the way in which he rebels against an adult society of
supposed fakery and complacency.

Now sixty-three-years-old, Clark claims that he is “real” and “oldschool”

because he hangs out with the kids and, though he is perhaps linked with what
was American subculture in his time, he actually made it into the adult world,
surpassing the threshold that his work is all about, his position seeming
somewhat less valid since he is no longer a member of the group he depicts.
Clark is not an adolescent, but he re-creates adolescence for himself, and for
his viewers, with every new oeuvre. I can inject Clark’s photos with my own
experience, becoming entranced by my own memories, shocking me into the
past, altering my past memories just as he alters his own. Considering my
relationship to Clark’s images makes me think: that was me. Catherine Keenan
states that “photographs do not only supplement memory but actually configure
it.”[2] She discusses the personal photograph and, in this sense, I would argue
that Clark’s photos are personal because of the commonality of adolescence,
which allows for the familiarity that Keenan establishes to be a trait inherent to
memory. Marianne Hirsch describes a phenomenon she entitles “post-memory”
which she defines as “the relationship of children of survivors of cultural or
collective trauma to the experiences of their parents, experiences that they
“remember” only as stories and images with which they grew up, but that are so
powerful, so monumental, as to constitute memories in their own right.”[3] What
I find pertinent about the idea of post-memory in relation to Clark’s work is the
generational gap it implies; Clark is my father’s age, and the subculture of his
youth is also that of my father’s but I feel as though somehow I remember it.
Clark creates this inter-generational collective memory because his subject
matter remains the same; he is always depicting youth and “allowing the
distances to disappear.”[4] Clark causes me to believe that I was there, in that
moment, even though I am now here, just as Clark is. If we survived the
traumas of our own adolescent subcultures and made it into the adult world, is it
possible for us to be truly compassionate?

9f2ea753 (Custom)

From Tulsa, @ Larry Clark

Clark originally intended Tulsa to be a film. It ended up being a photographic

bookwork because Clark was still very much a part of the world he was
depicting. Clark states that when he returned to Tulsa in 1971, his intentions
were “to make a one man movie, because the Tulsa scene, you know, I couldn’t
bring anybody in.” He elaborates that “then you know, just through the years I
got into the lifestyle—the outlaw lifestyle—and so into drugs and everything like
that, I certainly couldn’t have made a film, I was just too fucked-up.”[5] That
Tulsaended up being a photographic series even though much of Clark’s later
and most recent work is in cinema is emblematic, I would argue, of Clark’s
adulthood creeping in. The cinematic image is much more controlled for the
creator and the viewer; the cinematic image cannot be flipped through, and
Clark was still flipping through life when he went back to Tulsa. Clark’s Tulsa
pictures are imbued with aura, the recognition of a time and place, and the
suggestion that this was his life. It is the sense of innocence in the Tulsa
photographs that, I would argue, makes them so compelling. Clark achieves this
innocence on two levels: there is the innocence of youth, in the subjects he
represents who seem to have little conception of the consequences of their
actions, and there is the innocence with which the photos are taken. Clark’s
friends were accustomed to his camera’s presence, and the way in which it was
as much a part of their group as he was; “It was just a natural thing’ Clark says,
“I always had my cameras, but I wasn’t messing with anybody.”[6] Clark goes
on to state of his Tulsa pictures that, “for a brief period of time, I was the best
photographer in the world, and I’ll never be anywhere that close to good
again.”[7] Clark’s self-proclaimed success is recognition of the sense of reality
that is evident in Clark’s Tulsa photos; the ‘truth’ in Clark’s Tulsa photos allows
the spectator memory of their own past projected through Clark’s lens.

After Tulsa, there was a profound shift in Clark’s work, the success of Tulsa
placing him on a different level than the companions the series depicted. As a
successful member of the adult world, Clark was still interested in representing
adolescent subculture and the Tulsa crew was getting too old. No longer “too
fucked up” to make a film, Clark began to incorporate cinematic elements into
his work. In a review of a retrospective of Clark’s work, Jill Connor states, “The
exhibition veers away from strict photography in a section titled “Collages and
Video” made from 1989 to 1992. Clark must have realized that the combination
of mass media with his own work gave his vision more clarity.”[8] The fact that
Clark is believed to have a vision that he presents with clarity shows the shift
that occurred that I believe to be responsible for his adoption of the cinematic.
Cinematic images are strictly narrated and interpretation is minimal for both the
creator and the viewer. In the Tulsa images, Clark was involved in the events he
depicted, but with the shift to cinema, Clark employs strict narration to assert
what he is trying to say—what occurred naturally in Tulsa.

What was so compelling in Tulsa was the sense of reality that Clark presented;
this realness becomes the basis for his cinematic endeavours and is taken to a
level the photographic cannot reach; in fact, I would argue that his films, Untitled
(1994), Kids (1995), Another Day in Paradise (1998), Bully (2001) and Ken Park
(2005) are almost too real. The documentary-style imagery of Tulsa is
transposed onto the fictional worlds depicted in his films, and the power of the
moving image to completely immerse the spectator in the narrative is
paramount. The possibilities for reality in film are examined by Christian Metz,
who states, “There is thus a great difference between photography and the
cinema, which is an art of fiction and narration and has considerable projective
power. The movie spectator is absorbed, not by a has been there but by a
sense ofthere it is.”[9] It is fascinating that Clark’s adoption of cinema to present
what did not actually happen occurred when he could no longer depict what did
actually happen through photography. The capacity for film to present a kind of
hyper-real situation is thus used paradoxically, the content being fictional. It
seems appropriate, then, for Clark to enter the world of cinema, because he
himself wants to enter this constructed ‘reality’. Metz identifies the phenomenon
by which cinema has the power to convince, “to inject the reality of motion into
the unreality of the image and thus to render the world of the imagination more
real than it had ever been.”[10] Clark imagines himself within his films, basing
them on subcultures he desires to remain a part of.

As disturbing as his films may be, Clark is enchanted by “the outlaw” life of
youth and the otherness of adolescence. However, his escape from adulthood
into otherness is a trap for his adolescent subjects. Clark survived the
dangerous world of his own youth subculture but nevertheless wants to remain
inside of it. That there will always be more “fucked-up” kids for Clark to portray
leads me to question whether his work actually seeks to help these kids, or
simply works to help Clark stay within the margins of society and ‘keep it real’.

I am particularly interested in Clark’s film Kids (1995) because of its relationship

to a particular photographic image. When Kids was released it was considered
shocking. While the film is documentary-like because of the way it is shot and
because of how it seems unscripted, it was, in fact, highly-scripted. The film was
written by Harmony Korine, a real kid living in the world that Clark wanted to
depict. Clark told Korine stories that he wanted the movie to evince, and Korine
made them into a fluent screenplay. The story is devastating and repulsive; it
offends senses of morality and challenges the perception of the American
Dream. Kids is about a group of teenagers and preteens living in New York and
doing drugs, stealing, fighting, drinking and fucking, all of which is portrayed
vividly and explicitly on screen. The overarching story figures around Telly,
whose main goal in life is to de-flower virgins. Jenny, a lover from Telly’s past,
finds out that she has contracted HIV, and the only person she has slept with is
Telly. The rest of the movie focuses on Jenny’s desperate search to find Telly
before he sleeps with anyone else. Near the end of the movie, Jenny finds
herself at a party and takes a hit ecstasy before continuing her search. When
she finally finds Telly at another party, he is already in bed with another young
virgin. Disgusted and strung out, Jenny passes out on one of the couches. The
next and final scene shows Telly’s best friend waking up in the bathtub at the
same house party, whiskey bottle in hand. He walks out of the bathroom to find
the blacked-out Jenny. In possibly the most upsetting scene in the movie,
Telly’s best friend proceeds to rape the passed-out Jenny, indicative of the
extremes to which Clark goes to in depicting America’s youth.

My interest in this film comes from my projected relationship to Jenny and how I
recognize this projected self, a year after seeing the movie, in a photographic
still image from the film. This relationship stems from a complex interplay of the
projection that occurs between audience and cinema and the interplay that
occurs in photography. Laura Mulvey articulates how cinema has been
structured by a phallocentric unconscious in which the female form is the sight
of pleasure for the male viewer. Mulvey states:
Woman … stands in patriarchal culture as the signifier for the male other bound
by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions
through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still
tied to her place as bearer not maker, of meaning.[11]

In Kids, Jenny bears the tragedy of HIV/AIDS—the victim of Telly’s ignorance.

Telly and his best friend are also victims, but it is difficult to feel compassionate
toward them. In Kids, Clark has affectively transferred the fantasies and
obsessions of men into a rude awakening of how these can be devastating to
everyone involved. The suggestion of the impending death of Jenny affects me
in a number of ways: I relate to her as a female that has been used by a male,
and I relate to her role as what Mulvey describes as the bearer of meaning—
Jenny is the bearer of the meaning of HIV/AIDS, a meaning that has been
imposed on her by Telly, who told her that she was his “first”. Jenny is
consequently forced to deal with the fact that she is HIV-positive, and that this
status was caused by a man’s—Telly’s—fantasies and obsessions.

187592

Larry Clark Untitled (Kids), 1995

Portfolio of 15 C-prints
15 1/4 X 18 1/2 inches (38.7 X 47 cm)
Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.

A photographic still from Clark’s Untitled (Kids) (1995, fig. 1) causes me to feel
even more associated with Jenny. The photo depicts Jenny strung out in the
elevator on the way to the house party where she will find Telly having sex with
another virgin/victim. I find this image compositionally striking and the
expression on Jenny’s face extremely evocative. I saw this image after seeing
Kids, and it produces in me such an emotional reaction that I feel as though the
movie has now become a part of my personal memories, the photographic still
causing me to revert back not only to the film but also to my lived experience. I
grieve for Jenny’s impending death when I confront the photographic still more
so than I do when I watch the movie, which I attribute to the malleability of the
photo, as opposed to the structured narrative of cinema. The photo signifies
death to me in a number of ways: it signifies the death of the present moment;
the death of my adolescence; and the character’s death which reflects my own
fears of death, having projected myself onto the character of Jenny. The image
of Jenny becomes a death of the present moment because I instantly revert
back to memories I associate with it so that my mental presence (that which is
here and now) disappears and I lose myself in the image, falling into a moment
of the past that exists only in the form of a fictional experience. I am reminded of
a character in Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1991) for whom “the
sheer memory of another time causes his mind to foreclose the present
moment.”[12] The adolescent characters in Van Sant’s film “drift through a world
where they don’t belong.”[13] Imagined or real affinities to Jenny disassociate
me from the adult world of which I am supposed to belong, yet they do not offer
me anything more than a fictional world created by Clark within which I could
not belong. The photographic still of Jenny brings me back to the time and
space in which I was when watching Kids; I am thrown into an odd mental
space where I am dealing with two intersecting types of memory, one of the
imagination of myself within that film, and the other of my own lived experience,
of my youth, where I was not infected with HIV/AIDS but could have been. This
“it could have been me effect,” discussed by Hirsch in the context of post-
memory, takes hold, and it bothers me that a work of fiction is what makes me
realize this. It is the death of the present moment that throws me into thinking
about a past where it was not me, and I mourn guiltily because it comes from an
imagination not my own. The second death I mourn is the death of my
adolescence, a time I lived through and will never experience again, but feel
strongly attached to, it having formed my present self, it having occurred not so
long ago. Both the film and the photo remind me that my adolescence is over
because I am not doing those things now that I was doing then, the things that
made my affinities to the film so strong. Finally, I mourn the death of Jenny
because of our shared gender and our potential positions, as the bearers of
meaning. The mourning of Jenny’s death permeates into my present life,
perpetuating a slight but constant fear of my own death. Roland Barthes
discusses the mourning that can occur when looking at personal photographs of
‘what has ceased to be,’ and how the photographic image becomes a small
death. I think that the reason I feel a guilty or shameful kind of grief in relation to
the photographic still of Jenny is that it is not my own personal photograph, and
its quality of ‘ceasing to be’ seems falsified by the fact that it, for me, ‘never
was,’ except in its moment on the cinematic screen. My personal relationship to
this photographic image has been entirely constructed.

I have argued of Clark that in his later work, he takes up cinema to create a
constant adolescence for himself as he gets further and further away from it. I
try to denounce Clark for this because I can’t help but think of him as
contradictory, as rejecting adulthood while simultaneously benefiting from it. I
find Clark’s work difficult because he is no longer one of the adolescents he
depicts and could be read as a voyeur. It is hard not to be inclined to think that
Clark is living vicariously through his characters, using them as his medium to
maintain his rebellious persona, but at the same time, I find his work so
affecting that I cannot simply write it off as perverse. There is too strong a sense
of “punctum” in his imagery. I believe this sting of “punctum,” the element of the
photograph that Barthes argues reaches out and grabs us, stems from where
Clark’s work began, the photographing of his friends in Tulsa. In searching for
the punctum in the photographic still of Jenny, my process began with the
movie that became a part of my memory and entangled with my own adolescent
past. While I cannot quite identify the still’s punctum, I nevertheless believe it to
be there, engaging me in a process of dealing with a past that I could have had.
Clark’s work does allow for compassion, presenting the viewer with devastating,
‘real-life’ situations, and necessitating a working through of real or imagined
affinities in order to cope with a shameful sense of mourning traumas we did not
experience.

1986-57-14_1a-custom-3 1991-112-21_1a-custom-3 1992-32-15_1a-custom-3

Bibliography
Aletti, Vince. “First Break: Larry Clark,” Art Forum. 40:9 (May 2002) p 27.
Baxstrom, Richard and Todd Meyers. “Cinema Thinking Affect: The Hustler’s
Soft Magic,” Parachute 01_02_03_2006. pp 98-119.
Connor, Jill. “Death is More Perfect Than Life,” Afterimage. 32:6 (May/ June
2005) pp 33-6.
Hirsch, Marianne, “Projected Memory: Holocaust Photographs in Personal and
Public Fantasy,” in Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, Leo Spitzer, eds., Acts of
Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present. Hanover and London: Dartmouth
College, 1999, pp 2-23.
Keenan, Catherine. “On the Relationship Between Personal Photographs and
Individual Memory,” History of Photography 22:1 (Spring 1998) pp 60-4.
Metz , Christian, trans. Michael Taylor. “On the Impression of Reality in the
Cinema,” Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press. 1991.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Visual and Other
Pleasures. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989.
Pataphysics Magazine, “Interview with Larry Clark” Pataphysics Magazine:
Holiday Resort Issue (2003).
http://www.pataphysicsmagazine.com/clark_interview.html

Endnotes
1 Richard Baxstrom and Todd Meyers, “Cinema Thinking Affect: The Hustler’s
Soft Magic,” Parachute, 01_02_03_2006. 112.
2 Catherine Keenan, “On the Relationship Between Personal Photographs and
Individual Memory,History of Photography 22:1 (Spring 1998): 60.
3 Marianne Hirsch, “Projected Memory: Holocaust Photographs in Personal and
Public Fantasy,” in Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, Leo Spitzer, eds., Acts of
Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (Hanover and London: Dartmouth
College, 1999): 8.
4 Ibid. 10
5 Pataphysics Magazine, “Interview with Larry Clark,” Pataphysics Magazine:
Holiday Resort Issue (2003).
http://www.pataphysicsmagazine.com/clark_interview.html
6 Vince Aletti, “First Break: Larry Clark,” Art Forum, 40:9 (May 2002): 27.
7 Id.
8 Jill Connor, “Death is More Perfect Than Life,” Afterimage, 32:6 (May/ June
2005: 33-36.
9 Christian Metz, trans. Michael Taylor, “On the Impression of Reality in the
Cinema,” Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1991: 6.
10 Ibid. 15
11 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Visual and Other
Pleasures (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989): 15.
12 Baxstrom and Meyers, 98
13 Id.

(All rights reserved. Text @ Megan Bradley. Text reproduced with permission
from the Concordia Undergraduate Journal of Art History. Images @ Larry
Clark.)

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Posted in Front 1, Larry Clark and tagged Concordia Undergraduate Journal of
Art History, Essay L, Larry Clark, Megan Bradley.
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