Larry Clark Interview

Chris Johnston / Cooler Creative / 1996

Tall and impossibly gangly, Larry Clark is sidling through backlane Prahran, Melbourne, heading for a record store, any record store, and smoking his first joint of the day. "Here's a New York one for ya," he offers, dodging traffic, wheezing. "Fat. And sticky." We'd just been at a busy skatepark so he could celebrate the end of a two-day interview cycle. He managed a smile amongst the concrete fury and stood motionless for a few rolls of photos. He didn't so much want to go to the skatepark as need to go. Larry Clark, at 52, is barely an adult and he doesn't seem to want to be around them very much.

As America's black angel of pioneering hyper-real photography he's spent years depicting the sleaze and squalor of the unfettered young and his life with them. His merciless and grimly poignant books Tulsa (1971) and Teenage Lust (1983) are sought-after. You're doing well if you have a copy of either. Many of the stark, strictly black-and-white shots within are self-portraits of Clark with a variety of companions but most are of kids, some floundering and degenerate in smalltown Oklahoma, some tripping in New Mexico, and some selling themselves on the streets of Manhattan. It's eyes and cocks and skin and guns and needles and fixes. Cars. Bodies. Bottles. Clark was a player in this game. This is Gonzo taken one step further. You can see it. He's in on the fixes and the fucking. There's no law anywhere. No rules. No consequences.

Two shots from a life of it. One: Clark, Tulsa, 1973, self-portrait, backed against a corner, topless, furry freak hair, pinned eyes, tourniquet, dark blood dribbling down his arm. Two: a boy in a fedora hat fucking a wild-eyed, splayed nowheregirl on a single bed with a mirror-head as another man waits his turn, erect cock in hand. A hand-scrawled caption. "...They met a girl on acid in Bryant Park at 6am and took her home. 1980..." The law eventually came. With all the speed and smack and weed and acid and quaaludes and hookers and guns and criminals around, it was bound to. Clark spent nineteen months of the late 70s in maximum security in Oklahoma after various convictions... the ones that finally sealed it were shooting someone in the arm (the result of a speed-freak cardgame); being caught driving drunk, again; then being caught with a pistol, after a 'lude-haze eviction squabble turned nasty.

Now there's Kids, Clark's first film, which was written for him by a 19-year-old skater/writer called Harmony Korine, and which is a tale of HIV+ New York now, tomorrow, the next day, through the eyes of a bunch of stoned unsafesex-happy skatekids. There's no happy ending. Like in his infamous photographs, there's no resolution and no consequence. Sixteen-year-old Jenny tests positive after fucking teenage virgin-hunter Telly, spends 24 desperately out-of-it hours trawling the streets and dives of Manhattan trying to find him, and doesn't. She only finds more of the same. Kids was released unrated (basically an NC-17), which means no-one the age of the messengers was able to see it until video release. In America it bought either outrage or adulation; one west coast critic called it a "two hour Calvin Klein ad with a twist", criticising the film but unwittingly highlighting Clark's new impetus toward the exposure and credit he never really had. His blunt and sexually-charged depictions of youth and their forms have been mirrored by Calvin Klein and others in advertising. Hyper-reality and puberty are a style now. Clark's dim influence, however, goes back to the source...

Paul Schrader, who scripted Scorsese's seminal 1976 street movie Taxi Driver stylistically acknowledged Clark for his "rawness" and "immediacy." The streets of Prahran aren't too mean as we wind along behind this enormously tall man. He's clean now. He gets up at 5.30am to work out. He doesn't drink. Only smokes a bit of pot. Three kids; one 21, in Arizona, and two young boys, 12 and 8, at home with him in New York. Soho. First day back he was taking them to the Foo Fighters to meet Dave. He also knows Martin Scorsese as "Marty." He talks about Jello Biafra, Minor Threat, The Germs and Slint and buys Ben Lee, Dirty Three, Godstar, Smudge, You Am I and Spiderbait. And a Nirvana fanzine. And two rare Lennon platters that were hanging on the wall at $50 each. "John Lennon, man. John Lennon. I loved that guy."

Where were you when he died? "In bed with my wife in New York. Near the Dakota, in fact." What did you do? "She cried. Then I cried." Then what did you do? "I probably fucked her, man."