Mickey Rourke has signed on to star in a remake of classic 1980s Brit gangster pic "Mona Lisa."

Rourke will play an ex-con who takes a job as a chauffeur for a high-class escort. Eva Green is in advanced negotiations to star opposite him.

Bob Hoskins and Cathy Tyson; starred in the original 1986 pic directed by Neil Jordan.

Helmer Larry Clark ("Kids," "Wassup Rockers) is writing and directing the remake, which is being produced by Handmade Films with Handmade Films Intl. handling worldwide sales.

Lensing is set to begin in New York in July.

Rourke's deal was brokered by agent David Unger, Bill Sobel of Edelstein, Laird and Sobel and HandMade's Patrick Meehan.

source: Variety

Follow the production at Twitter/punkPicasso

Paul McCarthy: When was Tulsa?

Larry Clark: From 1962 to '71.

PM: Karen and I met in '63. In '66, '67, I'd drawn her in various poses with a view of
the vagina. Then I started taking photographs of her. Now I realize she was some
sort of muse. But I never thought of that word. I was a young guy. The muse was her,
the vagina and a set of drawings and photographs. I'm actually thinking of that period a lot.

LC: I never used the word muse either, but people now say that Jonathan has been my muse. I have all the photographs and I've made a film; I'm going to make another film and I'm doing the sculpture; it's like: How close can I get? How close can I get you to that person, to be that person, to be that age?


Jonathan Velasquez, 2004. Digital print, 107 x 73 cm.

PM: You said Jonathan's your muse?

LC: That's what people say.

PM: Is Jonathan also Tulsa or is that you?

LC: I think it's also me, it's also Tulsa. It gets very abstract. But not just me, nor
just Jonathan. I'm trying to get something in there that's not just what it appears to
be. It's not just documents at all. I want it to appear just documents but it's a lot
more than that. It's very strange because I've had people write that the work is very
creepy, that I'm sucking the life out of these teenagers. They're trying to put me
down, but sometimes it comes very close to that; to the desire to just hang someone
to the wall!

PM: But you give them something. In every one of these films, people walk away with
something. Some walk away with big prizes. Some walk away with careers. If you make a movie, the question might be, are they ready for it? They're so young, they hardly know what's happening.

LC: It's changed so much now; they're so aware of what's going on, more than they
used to be. When I was taking pictures in Oklahoma I didn't know what I was doing
and the people didn't know what I was doing. Now everybody is very aware of it.

PM: At 18 years old, you're aware but you're not…

LC: That's true. But in this context, it's obvious that I'm making their world much
bigger. I give them many more opportunities, whereas their world might be a
couple of square blocks. I can't say that I hurt anybody.

PM: There is a voyeur aspect. A bit of your voyeur in their world and you watch them.

LC: I think my audience is a much bigger voyeur than I am.

PM: Really?

LC: Maybe not.

PM: I mean you're a chooser. You seek it out and you choose it and then you
watch it.

LC: In the early work I was a part of it. In Tulsa I was part of the world and I was
photographing myself and my own life.

PM: Tulsa was a document

LC: Yes, a straight documentary. At that time, people were very excited to live that
life from looking at my work; that was voyeuristic because they didn't have to live it, but they could live it through my work. But maybe the later work does take on a more voyeuristic quality because it's not me. And I'm an old guy doing this stuff.


Carlos, Sergio, Porky, Jonathan, Churro, Eddie, Kico, Ricardo, Spermball (Milton), PJ,
Armando (detail), 2004. Digital print, 141 x 209 cm. Courtesy the artist, Luhring Augustine,
New York and Simon Lee Gallery, London.

PM: It's like recreating Tulsa. Do you long for it? I don't think my work is about
longing for the '70s. It's not the '70s that I long for. But, I remember I was talking to
Kristine Stiles once and she was going off on me and said that all this that I was
creating — all this stuff where I'd wear a Madonna mask or another kind of mask
and then talk about it in terms of architecture — none of it matters. Essentially, that
my work is latent behavior, that somehow it's about oppression. That it's all the same
and I just decorate it with this other stuff. Your work has groupings of teenagers
together, all going through some sort of journey. Each film has the same initial
structure as Tulsa. And there's a repeating of that. You could say Ken Park is different
from Wassup Rockers, or Kids is different from Ken Park, but in a way, it's all the
same. You repeat the same thing. And that's kind of what she was saying to me, and it's true, although there are other complexities.

LC: In mine it's always a small, isolated group of people that you don't see otherwise. Like you've never seen the people in Tulsa or the Latino kids in Wassup Rockers in the 'hood where only blacks and Latinos live. You never see these kids. It's not about longing at all, to me.

PM: Have you ever done a film or work of another period or time? I mean, have you
ever considered a period piece?

LC: Well, Another Day in Paradise was supposed to be about the '70s. But it wasn't
like a really different time. It was coming out of Tulsa.

PM: But another historical period is not something that you are interested in?

LC: You mean going earlier, like before I was born? It could. That's a good idea. But
I think that Tulsa was so real because it was a document&183; But, instead, Kids was a
scripted piece with acting and a lot of people came out of the film really pissed off thinking it was a documentary. It's interesting because the last thing I did for Flash Art was a talk with Mike Kelley ["In Youth Is Pleasure," Flash Art International 164, 1992]. Mike and I talked about Tulsa having this fictive quality to it. It was real but with a fictive quality.

When I made Kids, I turned it around. It was fiction but had a documentary quality to it. In Tulsa, I was making friends into movie stars. I was photographing that instant when they were doing what they were doing but the lighting was good. I was making a movie with real people living real lives. I recognized the drama that light and shadow cause and did something with it, when most photographers would have thought it was ugly. A documentary photographer would have made everyone ugly, focusing more on the action than on the people. I was more interested in the people than in the action. My friends could be murdering somebody but I was making sure they looked good doing it.

Basically what Kristine Stiles was saying is that we all have one story to tell. You are telling one story, but it's what most artists do. It's who you are. It's very interesting to
see your piece with you fucking a pig and then Bush's head...


Larry Clark with José Gutierrez of the band
LA's Moral Decay, 2005. C-print, dimensions
variable. Photo: Jonathan Velasquez

PM: I made this piece, called The Train, where eight figures are behind a pig and it
looks like a train. Then I made a rubber one where the head turns, the eyes and
mouth move and it talks to you. A figure is fucking the pig and a little pig is fucking
the eye of the big pig. When you enter the room the heads will follow you. It's a
complicated animatronic figure. That piece still has a straight-on view. The bodies melt together where the little pig's body is part of the big pig's and the Bush character now has three heads. One head is a pig's head. I also want to make sculpture that people can climb up into and get inside them. There's something about that which goes way back to somehow getting inside the body. The mask is not just a mask. It's a head inside a head. These structures are in one way formal, but in a way they're also very psychological. In the architecture of the body, being on the inside and being on the outside… Yeah, I want to translate the sensation of rubbing a penis, but it's more than just that.

LC: I'm trying to get inside of these people. With your work, I start tripping out on it poetically, about life. It can also be very political because I can read that into it. You're bringing out emotions and feelings and thoughts that can take you many places. I'll see your work about Bush and the pirate, and it just gets into how complex life is and what humans are capable of doing in the worst sense. It's really overwhelming to me.

PM: A few years ago I was using things like Santa Claus and Popeye as cultural
fabrications. Santa Claus is a cultural fabrication, like Mickey Mouse. When I decided to do the Piccadilly Circus piece, somebody asked us how it worked. I said, I'd like to shoot a movie in this weird building, a bank." They said, "You can do it, but you have to do it at night." But when we were sitting there, they said that the upstairs room is called the American Room, in this British Bank. And we asked why it was called that and they said that Bush was in the top room and Bin Laden was in the basement. And I said, "and the Queen is in the middle." Suddenly the structure was set up. At first I thought I didn't want to deal with that: George Bush at the top, Bin Laden in the basement and the Queen in the middle. I realized these figures where Bush and Bin Laden are almost cartoons, almost fabrications. They're almost not real. In a certain way they exist in a cloud zone. I said to someone, "They're no different from Santa Claus and Mickey Mouse." You can't help but feel this hopelessness. We are in a spectacle controlled by a spectacle and George Bush is a cartoon within it. And you'd think, "Well, just change the course of the spectacle." But is it really going to change? This is what that piece is about.

But, to go back to my question about the period, I was only interested in the period,
I'm not interested in a period piece. I'm interested in appropriating a period. It's almost like a film about Hollywood. By appropriating a Western, it's political. I think that a discussion about Hollywood is political because Hollywood is so much a part of Western colonialism. In one way, it's like critiquing the art world and critiquing Hollywood and critiquing Bush.

LC: Well, a lot of the art world is like Hollywood and like Disney. It's about the product.

PM: It's like that piece with the man in the chocolate factory, turning a gallery into a
store. An interesting thing with you is that you do have a real foot in the art world, in
the photography world and Hollywood.

LC: It's always about the work. It's certainly not about money. One thing I like about you is that the money that you make goes back into the work. You're spending more money on your work than you're making. And you're able to make bigger and bigger work. Whatever's in your imagination you're able to realize.

PM: I don't know how I got here.

LC: I don't either. I mean, I was a photographer and I was fucked up; I was dying
and I couldn't do anything else. The only thing I wanted to do was to make a film. And I cleaned myself up and changed my life and my image just to be able to make a film, and you're doing that to build a town. It's all about that.

PM: You do a show, a film or a culpture. Do you have hierarchies? Is one larger than the other or is one more critical to you?

LC: It's more about what I need to do at that point. It's all hard, but film is extremely hard because there's so much money and so many people involved, so many things that can fuck up as they always do and then it's a struggle to fix it. It might take ten years to make a film but I need to do other things too. I can't just do that.

When director Larry Clark was a teenager, people in his hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma, still liked to pretend everything was peachy behind their white picket fences. Even though the kids were mindlessly fucking and getting messed up on drugs, it wasn't something that was discussed—until Clark got his camera out. He spent eight years photographing himself and his outlaw buddies having sex, shooting up methamphetamines (one of them while pregnant), and looking bored, and published the grainy black-and-white images in his groundbreaking 1971 book, Tulsa. "Those were very repressed times," says Clark, whose father was a professional baby photographer. "I knew a girl who had five brothers who all fucked her, but no one did anything about it. Kids would come into school with black eyes because their parents were beating them up. So I started photographing things that weren't supposed to be going on. It was like visual anthropology."

Unapologetically graphic, Tulsa was a smack in the face for Middle America. He followed it up with another, even more extreme, photographic collection, Teenage Lust. One image shows a young girl on acid, eyes glazed and legs splayed as she's being fucked senseless by one boy, his friend watching and waiting for his turn. In lowercase type, Clark writes about his childhood, about "the fat girl next door who gave me blowjobs after school and i treated her mean and told all my pals. we kept count up to about three hundred the times we fucked her in the eighth grade. i got the crabs from babs. albert who said 'no i'm first, she's my sister.'" Long before Gus Van Sant and Nan Goldin came on the scene, Larry Clark was saying "fuck you" to parents under the naïve illusion that the kids were alright.

His books earned him a cult, art-house following, with Martin Scorsese citing Clark's work as a primary influence for the film Taxi Driver, Francis Ford Coppola for Rumble Fish, and Gus Van Sant for Drugstore Cowboy. But it wasn't until Clark moved into moviemaking himself that his bleak wake-up call was brought to the masses, most famously in 1995 in his first movie, Kids, an unshakably vivid Teenage Lust ..uloid. None of the cast, which included Chloe Sevigny, Rosario Dawson, and Justin Pierce, had ever acted before. Clark found them by befriending skater kids in Manhattan, one of whom, Harmony Korine, became his collaborator and wrote the dialogue to the movie. The result is a brutal piece of filmmaking, with no happy ending, no moral. "People ask me why I do this," says Clark. "Well, it's because I don't believe in letting the audience off the hook. Good cinema pulls you into a world, good or bad. You're in there with them. You relate to the human experience. And that's all I am trying to do when I make films."

He followed up Kids with five more movies, all but one (Another Day in Paradise) documenting adolescent subcultures. His most recent is Wassup Rockers, which follows a group of Salvadorian skater punks from South Central Los Angeles who hook up with a pair of Beverly Hills babes along the way. Again, none of the kids are professional actors – Clark met them at a Hollywood skate spot three days after moving from New York in 2003. His 2001 film Bully tells the true-life tale of a group of bored Florida teens who fuck a lot and murder one of their own. After being sent a copy of Bully, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) sent Clark a fax simply saying, "Our advice to America is: Hide your children." But his most shocking movie to date has been Ken Park, which packs a formidable X-rated teen punch as well. "With my movies, it's either love or hate," says Clark. "They either say, 'This is a masterpiece' or 'This is porno shit awful crap.' One writer said I should be put in jail after he saw Ken Park. I loved that. Because as an artist I feel that if everybody likes my work then something's wrong."

A scene in Ken Park where a teenage boy is molested by his drunken stepfather was the most difficult thing he has had to film in his whole career, says Clark. In it, the dad, who up to that point we have seen beating up his stepson, becomes eerily tender as he tugs gently on his sleeping kid's shorts and kisses him. "That actually happened to a friend of mine," says Clark. "But it was incredibly hard to film because we had no other point of reference. We had to figure out how to make it look real. There's a tremendous emotional price that you pay for that."

The movie ends with the three young protagonists having a ménage à trois. Ironically, this portrayal of teen group sex provides the sweetest moments in the movie. It is also, like most of the sex scenes in his movies, very realistic. So is there ever any actual on-set penetration in his films? "When people ask me that question, I say, 'What do you think?' But the truth is no, there isn't. I'm a visual artist, and there are camera angles that you can use to make it look real." Ken Park is as yet unreleased in the U.S. and the U.K. due to clearance issues with the soundtrack.

Critics have branded his work as exploitative and pornographic, but there's no doubt that his young muses have almost always benefited from the Larry Clark effect. Sevigny and Dawson are now major stars. Some of the kids in Wassup Rockers have already been approached by skate companies and conducted shoots with Vogue. Which leaves us with this question: Is Larry Clark merely a pied piper with a creepy teen obsession, repeatedly reliving his own misspent youth through his young protégés? Or is he one of the few artists brave enough to show us what really goes on when kids in America close their bedroom doors? "At the end of the day, what I show is real life," he says. "I tell the truth. And the truth can be shocking."



Words: Caroline Ryder
Photo: Dan Monick

Larry Clark started his career in 1972. His first monograph of documentary photographs Tulsa, published that year, was released to a huge amount of controversy. The book documented Clark and his friends during their adolescence, and showed graphic scenes of drug use and under age sex. At the time this type of social documentary was relatively uncommon and provoked strong discussion and reactions. Tulsa went on to become a photographic cult classic propelling Clark’s career.



Since then he has gone on to show in numerous international venues and now has work in several public collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Pinakothek Der Moderne.

Clark works as both a photographer and film director, his 1995 feature film debut Kids winning the Independent Spirit Award in 1996, and claiming nominations for both a Golden Palm and Sundance prize.



The Art Newspaper: Your latest exhibition focuses on the teenage development of Jonathon Velasquez, the lead character from your film Wassup Rockers. How did you meet him?

Larry Clark: My film Ken Park was opening in Paris and Rebel magazine had asked me to take some photographs for an issue. Tiffany (Limos, Peaches in Wassup Rockers) and I went from NY to LA to do the pictures. The other kids from the film weren’t around so I said ’well let’s go find us some skater kids’.

We met a load in Venice Beach at this little skate park. They were from South Central and looked kind of out of place there, but really interesting. We went out the next day to meet them all and Jonathan showed up.

TAN: Jonathon wasn’t a model or actor. What was it about him that struck you?

LC: He’s just had all this charisma, just completely appealing. The editor of Rebel magazine was just fascinated by this kid, so was Tiffany, we all were. He’s just one of those boys; women fall in love with him immediately.

During the screenings of Wassup Rockers, the film that Jonathon inspired, women would just gasp, 50 year old women would fall in love with this 14 year old boy. He’s a man child.

TAN: You ended up photographing Jonathon for four years, from 14 to 18. How often did you meet him during that time?

LC: I would go every week, at least once a week and sometimes more. Then as I was writing and getting ready to make the film more and more. I saw him almost every day for quite a while. I’ve known him since July 2003 and I still see him now. I’ve actually written a second film for Jonathan that I hope to make soon.

TAN: How did he adapt to being photographed over that period?

LC: It was natural, it wasn’t difficult at all. He got so used to it that in the end he became unaware of me. He’s not a model and he’s not an actor, which I think made him totally unselfconscious.

In fact now he’s 18 all of a sudden he is self-conscious. After he saw himself on the screen 40 foot tall, and saw the pictures, now he’s much harder to photograph.

TAN: Fourteen to eighteen is a key period in growing up. Were you conscious of the effect you may have had on him?

LC: The only effect I had would be to give these kids attention. I think something like this project really improves a sense of self worth. Jonathon met a lot of people, was taken all over California, Hollywood, out of South Central. His world in South Central was small, a few square blocks; it made the world much bigger.

I’m an old guy and I’ve been around, so I was always giving my life lessons, telling them about things, it turned into that sort of relationship. I don’t want to use the word ’mentor’ but it felt like that sometimes.

TAN: Pretty much all of your work, both film and photography, focuses on adolescence. What is it about that particular period in someone’s development that interests you?

LC: It’s the most interesting period in our lives; it’s when we’re formed. The things that happen to us at that age dictate what we’re going to be like when we grow up. You can be badly scarred during that time and it can affect you for the rest of your life.

My adolescence was pretty messed up, but I documented that in my work. Now it has become fertile territory for me.

TAN: When you made your first book Tulsa you were the same age as the kids as you were photographing. As you’ve grown older the people you photograph have stayed the same age. Has their reaction to you changed?

LC: It is different now as I’m not one of the kids. For some reason though, I can still do this, everyone is always very honest with me.

I made a film called Impaled that was shown as part of Neville Wakefield’s Destricted. During the making of that I was amazed how open everyone was. I guess it’s because I’m purely interested in people, that’s what it comes down to.

TAN: You move between stills and cinema often. Do you see yourself as a film maker or a photographer?

LC: Both. It’s interesting because after I started making films - 10 years ago - it ruined making photographs for me, for a long time. I would look through a view finder and it wouldn’t seem enough.

I felt like I should be making films because you see so much more.

When I met Jonathan I felt an opportunity to do something again with photography that I couldn’t do with film. It brought me back to making photographs; it brought me back to where I started. He was the perfect subject for that.

TAN: The prints on show in Los Angeles 2003 - 2006 are large scale pigment prints, a move away from your usual documentary style of exhibition. What was it about these particular images that made you want to present them in this style?

LC: I wanted the viewer to really see Jonathan and get to know him.

The prints are really big. A lot of them are life size or bigger and the paper we used was incredibly thick, so we could really saturate the colour. It took us three years to find the process but it gave them an incredibly life-like feel.

TAN: You are represented by large blue chip galleries both here and in the US. How does it feel to be a part of that side of the art world?

LC: The art world came to me really. I thought if I was going to be a part of it I wanted to be in an art gallery with painters, sculptors and other artists. I didn’t want to be in a photography gallery.

I joined Luhring Augustine just after they moved to SoHo in New York, at the beginning of 1989. At that time they had Christopher Wool and Richard Prince; I think I related more to other artists than other photographers.

I always felt photography was just a tool for me. I wanted to be a writer at first, then a filmmaker, a painter, I wanted to be anything. I just happened to have a camera so that became my tool.

TAN: Who buys your work?

LC: You’d have to ask the gallery!

TAN: So you’re not in contact with your collectors?

LC: Well yeah, I meet some of them now. They’re all kinds of people, regular every day people to big collectors.

TAN: Do you like being in large high profile collections?

LC: Yeah! I remember the first time I hung my work in a museum, I was thinking ’wow this is pretty crazy’. I never set out for this, I was just making photographs.

When I first started nobody bought photography, if somebody gave me $25 for a picture I would be thrilled. It was only in the 80s when collectors had everything they could buy, except photography, that the galleries opened up.

It never was, and still isn’t, about making work to sell for me. It is just about making work I need to make.

William Oliver | 21.2.08
The Art Newspaper

Larry Clark is 65 years old. He looks his age except for the clothes he is wearing: baggy pants and a hip-hop T-shirt. He must surely be the oldest skateboarder on the planet. The morning I meet him at the Simon Lee gallery in Mayfair, his nose is runny and his voice is low and hoarse. He looks rough and sounds like he has been up all night doing the things he used to do in the good old bad old days of his youth.



’Got to bed at four o’clock,’ he growls. ’Stayed up to watch the Superbowl. I was jumping up and down on my bed like a kid when the Giants pulled it off.’
Behaving like the oldest kid on the block is just one of the things that Larry Clark’s detractors hold against him. That, and his continuing fetishising of teenage rebellion in photographs and films that often wilfully skirt the fraught subject of adolescent - and sometimes pre-pubescent - sexuality.

As a filmmaker he is best known for Kids, his debut feature from 1995. It launched the careers of Chloe Sevigny and Rosario Dawson, and caused a moral panic with its depiction of a gang of young urban teenagers drinking, drug-taking and having unprotected casual sex.

’Some people seem to think I’m some kind of pervert because I film and photograph kids,’ he says, ’but just look at the work. It’s real situations. It’s about real life. Teenagers have sex, they smoke weed. I don’t think I’m putting anything in there just to shock. I really don’t.’

In Ken Park, though, his even more controversial film from 2002, he included a scene in which a young boy indulges in autoerotic asphyxiation. The shock factor, though, lies not just in the subject matter but in the style in which he portrays it. His camera has a tendency to linger on its subjects, their lithe, young, often barely clothed bodies lit with lush tones. One critic described Clark’s photographic technique as ’drawing you into the moral void of gorgeously sensuous squalor’.

Clark, of course, sees it differently. ’A lot of adults see my work and go, "Oh this is Larry Clark’s fantasy. Teenagers don’t live like this,"’ he says. ’But, hey, read the papers. All teenagers have a secret life and it’s always darker than what their parents think. The thing is, the kids themselves always get it. They can always tell if it’s real or not.’

Clark is in London for the opening of an exhibition of his most recent photographs, entitled Los Angeles 2003-2006. It’s familiar turf, a record of the four years he spent trailing a bunch of young Hispanic teenagers who live in Compton, in South Central Los Angeles, which Larry refers to simply as ’the hood’. Mostly, they are the same kids who featured in his last film, Wassup Rockers, which came and went without much fanfare. The narrative, what there is of it, concerns the coming of age of Jonathan Velasquez, a baby-faced Latino who caught Clark’s attention back in the summer of 2003, when he was just 14.

What did the Hispanic kids think of him, this old guy on a skateboard who walks it and talks it like a teenager? Were they initially suspicious of his motives? ’Never,’ Clark says, shooting me a dark look. ’They accepted me. They get what I’m doing, too. The thing is,’ he says without irony, ’if I wasn’t cool I couldn’t get within two miles of these kids.’

Clark is entertaining company, but it’s hard to know what to make of a grandfather who still puts such stock in his street cred. Likewise his new photographs, which are saturated in colour but oddly drained of meaning. They are not reportage or photojournalism, but sit somewhere between a street fashion shoot and a series of well-taken snapshots. As seen through Clark’s lens, Hispanic teen life in South Central looks neither as dangerous nor as transgressive as he insists it is.

’They’re kind of like punks,’ Clark says of the scrawny kids from Compton, ’with the tight jeans and painted shoes. They have a style that they call "dressing young". Basically, they wear the same clothes they wore when they were 12, but now they’re 15 or 16.’

I’m tempted to say that Clark himself invented the ’dressing young’ concept, but I let it pass.

There is something about Clarke that defies cynicism. He seems both street tough and oddly vulnerable, and seems obsessed for reasons he has no interest in exploring - except through photography - with the ever-shifting iconography of adolescence: the slang, the dress codes, the haircuts. It’s anthropology of a kind, but it’s all surface.

What is palpable throughout is the homoerotic undertow that is a constant in all his work. He speaks of Jonathan Velasquez’s ’utter lack of self-consciousness’, which is certainly on display in a series of images of the boy in bulging underpants. This is where the complexity lies in Clark’s photographs, in the distance between their subjects’ lack of self-consciousness and the camera’s all-too-aware rendering of the same.

It was ever thus with Larry Clark, but the innocent faces and saturated colours of Los Angeles 2003-2006 are a long way from the blank stares and monochrome starkness of Tulsa, his first and most powerful book, published in 1971. It remains one of the most influential photography books of recent times, its raw imagery diluted for countless fashion shoots, its groundbreaking confessional style a catalyst for the work of younger photographers such as Nan Goldin and Corinne Day. I tell him how taken aback I was when I first came across Tulsa in the late Eighties. ’Well, that work was kind of scary and shocking to me when I first spread it out to look at it,’ he says. ’I remember thinking, "I have either got to burn all the negatives and shoot myself, or go down to LA and try and get it published." It took a while to do that.’

Many of the images in Tulsa were taken in the mid-Sixties, when Clark was living what he calls ’the outlaw life’ with his equally self-destructive friends, shooting methamphetamine, toting guns and having sex with various whacked-out girlfriends. The foreword reads, ’When I was 16, I started shooting amphetamine. I shot with my friends every day for three years and then left town, but I’ve gone back through the years, once the needle goes in, it never comes out.’

Was he aware at the time that he was creating a document that was both transgressive and shocking in its rawness? ’Well, I knew I was making groundbreaking photographs because I had never seen images like that before,’ he says without hesitation. ’I knew in some way that I was photographing things that were not supposed to be photographed. Forbidden things. It just happened to be things I was doing myself as an 18-year-old. In a way, it’s a record of my secret teenage life.’

By the sound of it, Clark had quite an unsettled and chaotic childhood, too. Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in January 1943, he claims he was ’forced into the family business at 14’. His mother was a photographer who specialised in mother-and-baby portraits. ’I was this skinny kid who stuttered really badly,’ he says, smiling ruefully. ’Basically, I had to go and make these babies laugh by acting silly. I’d put stuff on my head, make it fall off, mess around some and then snap a picture soon as the kid started laughing at me. That was my apprenticeship, man.’

When I ask Clark about his father, he falls uncharacteristically silent. ’Well, I didn’t have a happy childhood. At all.’ Was it violent? Abusive? ’Nah. I just had a lot of issues with my father, which isn’t unusual, but it just seemed to fuck me up. I think I felt ignored. Unloved.’

He stares at the table for a moment, obviously uncomfortable. I am just about to move on to another subject when he says, ’I guess what I really felt was that I was hated by my father for no reason.’ Did they ever work it out? ’No. Never worked it out.’ Another silence. ’He’s gone now. Lived until he was 83, but we never worked it out.’

It is hard not to see Clark’s continuing obsession with teen culture as a reaction to his own upbringing. Likewise, the turbulent and occasionally self-destructive lifestyle he embraced as a young man. He was, he says, ’always a loner, running fast’. He served in Vietnam from 1964 to 1966 in a unit that supplied ammunition to the troops up-country. Even that experience, though, did not impinge on his outlaw lifestyle.

’Strongest grass I ever smoked was in Vietnam. Never took any damn photographs. I used to go into the villages and smoke opium with old guys who looked like Gunga Din. It was not a good time for me creatively.’

After the speed-shooting early-Sixties years recorded in Tulsa, he embraced the outlaw life even more wholeheartedly - or perhaps desperately. I ask him to define ’the outlaw life’. He sighs, though whether this is out of weariness and regret, or impatience at my line of questioning, is difficult to tell.

’It was just far-out stuff, crazy stuff. I had a girlfriend who was a prostitute. We had a racket together. We’d go around Oklahoma to doctors. Crooked doctors. She’d go in and give them a blow job and they’d write us some prescriptions.’

He laughs a hard, hollow laugh, and shakes his head. ’I ain’t saying it was good or bad, it was just crazy. I didn’t earn a dime from commercial photography because I couldn’t get it together. I was out there on the battlefield a long time. A drug addict and an alcoholic.’ How bad did it get? ’Real bad. Put it this way, when someone I knew would die, which happened a lot, I’d think they were one of the lucky ones. I honestly used to think I was cursed to stay on earth and make photographs.’

He returned to Tulsa a few years back to see if he could make another body of work on the same subject. The sheer scale of the methamphetamine epidemic defeated him. ’It’s massive now, not just in Oklahoma but all over the country. And, it’s grimmer. I wanted to do a film, too, but it was all just so dark and depressing. I couldn’t find any hope.’

To Larry Clark’s credit, there is always a glimmer of hope in his work, the fleeting chance of redemption. Even in Kids, supposedly his most amoral film, it’s there, flickering.

For better or worse, Clark has created at least two signatures: the raw, unflinching imagery of the Tulsa photographs, and the meandering, observational, but seldom illuminating style of his films. And, I have to say, he is great company, one colourful anecdote rolling into another, his enthusiasm and unflagging self-belief a breach against all the critical flak he endures, and, indeed, wilfully incites. Is he utterly amoral? No. Is he often misguided? Yes. Then again, true obsessives often are.

Sean O’Hagan
Sunday February 17, 2008
The Observer

The filmmaker learnt a lot from his new short, writes Philippa Hawker.



The Destricted project was, in many ways, an invitation to go too far - to test boundaries and to step outside them. It's a feature film made up of seven short works by seven artists who were invited to explore the place where art and pornography intersect.

The seven responded to the challenge in very different ways. It is a mixed bag, to say the least.

There is Matthew Barney's slow-moving encounter between man and machine and Marina Abramovic's irresistibly comic representation of Balkan fertility rituals.

Richard Prince appropriates a '70s porn short and gives it a new soundscape. Sam Taylor-Wood's lone masturbator in Death Valley is like a diminished trace memory of all those energetic couplings that took place in the same location in Antonioni's Zabriskie Point.

Marco Brambilla delivers a super-fast montage of porn and sex scenes; Gaspar Noe's relentless strobe lighting has as much shock value as anything sexual that he puts on the screen.

But the film that lingers in the mind is Larry Clark's contribution, a 38-minute work entitled Impaled. It's a collection of interviews that ends with a sexual act: it's a disconcerting piece of anthropology and storytelling, a tale of the disappointments of desire, and a melancholy account of what happens when a young man is granted a wish.

Clark, a photographer and filmmaker, was happy to be asked to be part of the Destricted project, he says, on the phone from the US. "It was like being invited to be part of a group art show. And I thought it was good company, with Matthew Barney and Richard Prince."

But it took him a while to come up with the idea for his contribution. What got him started was a question that he did not have an answer for: what effect does pornography have on young people?

Since the 1980s and the advent of video technology, it has been much more widely circulated than it was when he was growing up, he says: the internet has made it even more readily available. Clark himself has no great interest in porn, he adds, "but I'm curious about the fact that kids nowadays see it. I have a daughter of 21, a son of 24 and I've been taken aback by what they're exposed to, the innocence that I had as a kid just isn't around any more."

For more than 40 years, Clark has produced images of youth and youth culture, photographs and films that have a raw, documentary quality, a mixture of bleakness and exhilaration, a distressing candour and an embrace of sensation.

Clark, now 64, began taking pictures of himself and his contemporaries, kids from Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the late 1960s and '70s. His early photographs convey a dark, sometimes troubled vision of what it means to be young: an intimate knowledge that comes from observation and experience.

He has continued to focus on kids on the edge, on beauty and danger and risk. In 1995, he directed his first film, Kids, a movie haunted by the spectre of AIDS. He directed Bully, based on a true story, about a group of young people who killed one of their number who had been picking on the others; and he made Ken Park, a tale of exploited and endangered Californian teens, a movie whose sexual explicitness led to a hotly debated ban in Australia.

Preparing Impaled, "I wondered about the availability of porn everywhere," he says, "and how it affected what they thought about sex, what it was, what influence it had."

There was already the germ of an idea that came from a sexual encounter he had a few years ago, when a girlfriend had missed taking her contraceptive pill, and asked him to come outside her. "And she said her last boyfriend - she had been with him for three years - always did that. It was what he liked. I thought it was the oddest thing I had ever heard in my life."

To set his film in train, he contacted a porn producer, Robert Lombard, whom he had met socially a few years before, and told him what he wanted to do. The idea was to interview a group of young men who had grown up with porn, who had first seen it at an early age and watched it a lot. From this group, he would pick one. The chosen one would then have the chance to meet a group of porn actresses, select one, and have sex with her on camera.

What would happen if the positions were reversed? Could he have made a film in which a group of young women "auditioned" for the chance to have sex with a male porn star? Clark doesn't think so.

"I can't speak for women," he says, but as far as he knows, there is no widespread female fantasy about having sex with a porn actor. And for another, he adds, he wouldn't be interested in talking to male porn stars.

The female porn stars he met, he says, were "smart, amazing and articulate and I liked them". He came across a couple of male porn actors when he was preparing Impaled: by contrast they were "dead from the neck up", "blank and uninteresting".

For Impaled, Clark asked Lombard to help him find actresses who were "natural, without implants, and who had pubic hair". He called on Lombard's assistant, a young man in college, to locate a selection of male interview subjects. The kids Clark talks to are in their late teens or early 20s. One is a virgin. One served in Iraq. One first saw porn at the age of seven.

Clark asks them some general questions about their first encounter with porn, about sexual experiences, about what they'd like to do if they got the chance to have sex with a porn star. They are, for the most part, matter-of-fact, soft-spoken. "I thought they were very open and honest," Clark says. They are, if anything, a little diffident about themselves and what they have to offer.

Clark didn't find it difficult to choose his winner - "he was so photogenic" - and the boy he selected seems to have little trouble choosing his sexual partner from among the women whom he meets, and whose varied, sometimes distressing experiences and stories he hears. The interviews are all conducted in Lombard's office, which has a lurid apple-green couch, yellow walls and a brightly coloured painting of a submarine and fish. Although Clark had booked a studio to film his final sex scene, he decided at the last minute to cancel it and shoot it in the office.

He regards Impaled as an educational film: "educational to me". For while he expected that porn imagery would influence young people, what he didn't realise was just how much it would affect the sexual expectations and behaviour of the boys he talked to. He was struck by how so many of them shaved their pubic hair, because that's what the porn actors do. How the ejaculating "money shot" was considered desirable. It confounds him, he says. He is also concerned about young people seeing porn at a very early age.

His next project is a screenplay that he has co-written "based on Neil Jordan's great movie Mona Lisa, which we're casting now". There is a film called Wild Child, written for Jonathan Velasquez, who appeared in his most recent feature, Wassup Rockers, a tale of Latino skaters. He now has an exhibition in New York City, a book and photography show that will also travel to London.

And he hasn't left the subject of porn behind. There's a film he is sure he will make one day, based on a script written with a former girlfriend. "She was exposed to porn at a very early age, from five years old. Her father was addicted to porn: she would get up in the middle of the night to get a glass of water, and he'd be sitting in the living room, in a certain chair, watching porn."

Somehow, he says, he'll find the money to get it to the screen. "And even if I don't get the money, I'll find a way to make it."

© 2007 The Age, Australia - Sept 28, 2007

Interview by Raphaël Cuir | art press 333 (August 2007)

A year ago, seven short films by Marina Abramovic, Matthew Barney, Gaspar Noé, Richard Prince, Marco Brambilla, Sam Taylor-Wood and Larry Clark were shown at Cannes under the title Destricted. The idea of producers Mel Agace and Neville Wakefield was to deal "explicitly" with sexuality, and so blur the boundaries between art and pornography. The films go on general release in France this spring (April 25) and a DVD is due in October. Here was a perfect reason for making an old dream come true and meeting up with Larry Clark, whose short is definitely the most graphic of the seven.(1)

While the images from Larry Clark's Tulsa series (1963-1971) may have lost some of their subversive edge over the last forty-odd years, they remain as intense as ever. Clark always claims that there is a price, an emotional price to be paid for such violence. In the past, this meant the return of the repressed, the other side of the American dream (some people still haven't got over it). Today, still, it means opening "the whole of human nature to consciousness of the self" (Bataille). And, since "we cannot know what the body is capable of" (Spinoza), we must explore, and there are many surprises ahead of us (Nietzsche: "What's amazing is the body"). Adolescence is a key moment in this exploration; it is when an individual discovers the possibilities offered by physical maturity. The physical omnipotence of teenagers, who balk at nothing but do not always measure the consequences of their acts, is at the heart of Clark's concerns. How lives change, get trapped, slip away from themselves, how they avoid the worst, how, at each moment, our acts engage our responsibility, condition our lives, and what the world does with us—that is what Clark's films home in on. Clark himself has looked deep into the abyss, and though he has stepped back from the edge he continues to show us what is there—what regards us there. He has chosen to exhibit the "brutality" of facts (Michel Leiris), but in the intimacy and the density of the moment preserved forever on film. Forty years on, Clark's first images continue to remind us that the abyss is within us (Victor Hugo). His Kids is already a classic.

Your photographic work has been compared to that of Robert Frank and Diane Arbus. Are those connections you would endorse?

People like Robert Frank inspired me. But I was really influenced more by people like Lenny Bruce. He was all about the truth and he cut through the bullshit and he was always commenting on the hypocrisy of America, which I was living and seeing. That was important to me, I was really influenced by those kinds of people.

Concerning the Tulsa series (1971), you were really part of the scene you photographed, you were really into it, having drugs and sex with those people on the photographs… How did you manage to take the photographs?

Well, you know I've had a camera in my hands since I was super-young. And then I just had this epiphany one day that I could photograph my friends, cause I've never seen anything like this. I was coming out of the 1950s where everything was repressed and back then in America, there was no talk of drugs and things like that. It wasn't supposed to exist, but it did exist. I was just kind of practicing my photography at first and if you look at the Tulsa book it's mostly rooms. So we're talking about fairly small confined spaces and the Leica was very quiet— I couldn't have done it with a simple reflex camera, where the mirrors smash together.The Leica was very, very quiet and everybody got used to it pretty quickly. It was more like, if I didn't have my camera, it was "Larry where's your camera?" as opposed to, "you gonna take my picture?" I was just part of the scene, and it was very organic, it really came from a place where there was no thought ever to show the pictures or publish the pictures or anything for a while. It was very intimate in that way, and I'm very close to the people with a 50mm lens, so I'm like right here.


For you there's a cinematic quality in the Tulsa series?

The book is laid out like a film: you're seeing the same people over a period of years, so it becomes visual anthropology. I was seeing it as a film, I mean I was in the scene, but I was able, I think, to be two people at the same time. I had lived in Tulsa and when I was 18, I went to a photography school for two years, which was in the basement of an art school. My friends were students who were sculptors and painters, and I realized what was going on, and I saw that you can use anything for self-expression. I would have preferred to have been a painter or a sculptor— anything but a photographer; a writer even—but I happened to have a camera.

I was wondering how the drugs would affect your perception and if you could feel it?

I became much more focused; very, very focused. I mean, I was a very hyper kid, super hyper kid. Many kids today if they show any sign of being hyper active, they give them Ritalin to slow them down, or to calm them down they give them some kind of speed. When you have ADD or something, your brain is moving so quick that you can't focus, you know? There is too many things going on, and the speed like levels you out or equals you out. And so maybe, just by accident, I fell into this world of drugs that calmed me down a bit, and leveled me out and gave me this terrific focus where I could make these photographs.

It's kind of the reverse of what you'd expect.

There is this calm in the storm, in the eye of the storm, that I would find through speed. So I was actually self-medicating myself without knowing what I was doing. And I think that calmness enabled me to make photographs, like in the book, especially when there was so much going on, and even when there wasn't a lot going on. It was all, I guess, interesting to me.

"This guy is on my turf"

How did you shift from photography to movies, how did you decide that the next thing had to be a movie, especially a movie like Kids (1995), which was certainly not the easiest way to start as a filmmaker?

I always wanted to be a filmmaker, but I was so involved in the lifestyle and got so crazy with the lifestyle of the outlaw and drugs and drinking, that I wouldn't have been able to make a film, I was just too fucked up. So finally, I just said it's now or never: I want to make a film. People called me up and said "you got to see Gus Van Sant's Drugstore Cowboy, this guy's doing you," so I went to see the film and it was a good film.

But my reaction was, "This guy is on my turf, I should be doing this." So I decided I was going to make a film and I went on a personal kind of rehabilitation, I cleaned myself up and got myself together. I knew that I had to clean up my image to get anybody to give me money to make a film and to be taken seriously. I'd done a lot of crazy things, this is a reputation I still have. But I came out and was able to do this and I'd done so much autobiography that I wanted to make a film that wasn't about me at all. I had three kids then and my son was twelve. He was approaching adolescence and my daughter was younger and I have another daughter who's older from the outlaw years.

And I said, well I want to make a film about contemporary teenagers that I really didn't know anything about, that wasn't about me and that's kind of what started it. I explored that and looked around, and I thought that the skateboarders were the most interesting—certainly, visually exciting and interesting—and they were treated like outlaws and everybody was afraid of them and hated them. Adults and cops were freaked out by skateboarders, and I decided that it was because they had so much freedom that they could go anywhere and do anything and were totally self reliant, so I started exploring that world. I hung out with skaters from around the country for about three years before I got the idea for the film.

But Kids doesn't seem to be so much about skating?

I wanted to show what was going on with this group of downtown skaters in New York. There is very little skating in that film but it's actually a skateboard film. Everything in that film was true and I'd seen a lot of it happen and I knew for a fact that there were also other things happening and I wanted to show this life, but I didn't have anything to hook it on. I understood if I made a film that showed all of these scenes without
some kind of hook that it wasn't going to work very well.

I knew this kid, this 15 year-old kid, in Washington Square. Safe sex was being discussed constantly. They were going to give out condoms in the high schools in New York. The Catholic Church was against it and there was this controversy, it was front page headlines, and the planned parenthood organization was going around New York giving away free condoms, that summer, to everybody, and kids were walking around with strings of condoms around their necks. And this one kid I'm talking to he says, "I practice safe sex, I only fuck virgins." And over the summer I watched him deflower a couple of virgins and he would take these young girls, he was very young himself, and he was very nice to them. And so I got this idea about a girl who gets AIDS from one sexual encounter, which is the only thing in Kids totally made up.


Why do you call yourself a moral filmmaker?

Well there's a moral center to all the films. I think: consequences, you know? Since the Tulsa book, I've been called many, many names, "pornographer," "child pornographer," "garbage," "trash," "he's romanticizing drugs," and on and on and on… But there is a moral center to all the work and the moral center is consequences. Consequences for everything that we do, and that's just a fact.

There is the question of the aesthetic of violence: if you wrap violence in aesthetics then you might give it some appeal. It's like legitimizing it.

I think that regarding the violence that is shown in my films and in the photographs there is always a price to pay for looking at the work. I mean, I'm going to make the audience pay a price for this. I try to get the reality so they pay the price. You see so many films, there's violence everywhere in film, but there is no price to pay. Hundreds of people get killed, thousands of people get killed and it means nothing.

You have kind of a realistic style, showing things as happening here and now, sometimes almost like a documentary. Does it allow you to remove yourself to a certain distance from the way things happen in front of the movie camera?

A real documentary like Tulsa has a fiction quality to it, and the fiction films have a documentary quality, so I thought kind of turn it around. You know, I don't really want to have a style, if you have a style your kind of locked in and you lose that freedom. If you don't, then I think you're free. I'm always fighting against that.

It is well known that sex is one of the most difficult subjects in any area of creation, if you want to avoid platitudes. Would you say that sex scenes are among the most difficult to shoot?

Sex scenes are the toughest, to make it look real and to make it work. There are so many reasons for this, a million reasons. Thinking about it can be very erotic but sometimes, watching it happen, it's not. So I think you have to be a really good visual artist to pull it off, especially if you're setting it up. It all comes down to having a clear vision. I just happen to know what I want.

"I know what I want"

But how do you manage to get this sense of spontaneity, of authenticity that characterizes the sex scenes between, let's say, Lisa (Rachel Miner) and Marty (Brad Renfro) in Bully (2001), or the cunnilingus scene in Ken Park (2003), which is really so true and so daring?

It was a lot of work and a lot of direction. I ate a lot of pussy and I ate a lot more pussy and I figured out how to make it look right and how to film it. And then to teach the actor how to do it. That's just work, really thinking it out, you know?

But to get this kind of intimacy between the two actors. Do you kind of keep it very quiet on the movie set?

First of all you have a closed set and you have the least, the very minimal amount of people. Everybody is in another room including the sound people, and then you create this environment and I really work with the actors. And since I know what I want, then I'll know when I have it. It's difficult. We worked it out. There is no one way. It changes every time, whoever you're doing it with. It's always hard. The most difficult sex scene was the one in Ken Park where the father goes in and gives his kid a blowjob at nighttime. That was the toughest one, emotionally, because none of us knew that. And we had to figure it out and I had to make it up and you really pay an emotional price for that. It's my job to really make people understand what we are doing here and what it's going to look like. It all comes down to trust and I have to trust them, and if there wasn't that mutual trust then it wouldn't work. The sex scene at the end of Ken Park was really difficult, but I felt it was important.

"A tremendous emotional price"

Sometimes it seems that actors in your movies, are not so much acting as they are performing in front of the camera, like performance artists in the seventies such as Chris Burden or Vito Acconci. In Ken Park, when Tate jacks off while strangling himself and watching the tennis woman on TV, we see the ejaculation and a close-up on his dick dripping sperm. Obviously the actor might have had to do the thing for real in front of the camera… How do you work out scenes like that?

Obviously, that was one take, amazing. And it never crossed anybody's mind that I was actually going to film it like that. I told Harmony Korine [the screenwriter] what I wanted and what the scene was. Harmony wrote the scene and it's on his face, I said, "No man, I want to show this." I knew that it needed to be shown exactly like it was. When we filmed it was just Ed Lachman, my DP, and myself. We both had cameras. That was it.

It must be very hard to get an actor to do that, it's so demanding.

Yeah, it is hard. James Ranson, the actor, was the first person that I cast in Ken Park, I cast him about a year earlier, and so he had time to rehearse [laughs]. It's a devastating thing to do to yourself. I mean it was one of the bravest, strongest things. And he paid a price for that; he paid a tremendous emotional price.

When the scene was over he was shattered, he was a mess—he just, like, collapsed. Psychologically it was devastating but he trusted me enough to do that, so as I say, it's all about trust between the actor and me. You could probably find other scenes in the film where it would never occur to people to shoot it the way I did, to actually show it. It's so forbidden and there are so many rules, that you just wouldn't do that.

Whereas for me, it never occurred to me not to do it. I come from the art world and you mentioned a couple of good ones, Chris and Vito. I doubt that it would occur to them to do it any other way also. But I couldn't have done it, I wouldn't have done it, if I had to do it any other way. Which brings up another problem, a challenge for me now. I have a screenplay about a girl growing up in Texas from kindergarten to age 14. And as she grows up there is a lot of sexual stuff that happens, and stuff like that you couldn't film you couldn't show. There's just no way that one could do that. So now, for that film, I have to figure out how to do this without showing stuff and make it just as powerful, so that's a new challenge.

Have you been fighting censorship? And how far does it go?

I'm always fighting censorship, or they are fighting me, you know? It's always like that. Especially making films, you run into a lot, because there are these phony censor boards, the MPAA, which is run by the studios. It is the most corrupt stupid shit in the world. I mean, these people are just corrupt, corrupt, corrupt. It means nothing. But they control the theaters, and they say, well if you don't like it, then just put your film out unrated, but then if you don't get a rating, you can't get theaters, because theaters won't run films that are unrated or that are rated X. And its run by the studios, so you can have Sharon Stone stabbing Michael Douglas while she's fucking him and it's ok, because it is a big studio movie that makes a lot of money. They pick on the small indie movies, that they don't care about, like my films and a lot of other filmmakers.

It's a totally separate standard and it's complete bullshit. Realistically when you make a film there is that kind of thing. But I just make the work, you know. Ken Park could never be cut one frame, the contracts all say it could never be altered or changed or cut or censored in any way, and if there are countries that have a problem with it, then fuck it, they can't show it, I don't care.

What's next?

I'm going to have an exhibition of photographs in the fall, in Luhring Augustine gallery (New York). I have a lot of work to do. I have four screenplays ready to go, maybe the next one will be a film called Wild Child, a small film, back in the ghetto again, we'll shoot it in South Central, I like South Central, I like shooting there.
I'm too busy. Trying to stay busy, okay?

© 2007 art press, the contemporary art journal

Larry Clark : Los Angeles 2003-2006

September 8th - October 13th, 2007

Luhring Augustine is pleased to announce its forthcoming exhibition of new photographs by the renowned American photographer and filmmaker Larry Clark. This exhibition will mark the sixth solo exhibition by the artist at Luhring Augustine since the survey in 1990 of photographs from Clark's Tulsa and Teenage Lust series.

Los Angeles 2003-2006 reflects the artist's life-long interest in the subject of today's youth within a marginalized urban environment. In this particular body of work, we witness the physical transformation of Jonathan Velasquez throughout the period of his adolescent years. Jonathan, a teenager living in South Central Los Angeles whom the artist encountered by chance, inspired Clark to write and direct the film Wassup Rockers. In this obsessive four year photographic chronicle of Jonathan's life, we experience not so much the unfolding of a series of portraits but rather the weaving of the subject's personal life within the context of a particular social milieu common to so many of today's urban youth subcultures.

Building upon Larry's previous photographic accomplishments beginning with Tulsa, Teenage Lust, 1992, the Perfect Childhood, punk Picasso, and in film with Kids, Bully, Ken Park and Wassup Rockers this series of photographs further probes with equal intensity and unabashed honesty the often subtle, often glaring changes that all youth, and in particular Jonathan, go through in their teenage years. The close-up shots, the full length frontal views, the groupings of Jonathan with his friends all combine to portray the vulnerability as well as the subjects' expressions of newfound individuality, vitality and independence of life style. The large scale pigment prints reflect a departure for Clark from the more spare and documentary sensibility that characterize his earlier work, and in so doing allow for a more tender and evocative exploration of his subject.

A monographic publication featuring the entire series of photographs will accompany the exhibition, which starts September 8th through october 13th 2007

Luhring Augustine
531 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10011

Gallery Hours
Tuesday - Saturday, 10am - 6pm

LuhringAugustine.com

Ever since his horny AIDS parable, Kids, debuted at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival to both horrified gasps and applause, photographer Larry Clark has made his name as a fringe auteur of adolescent sexual mischief. From the sadomasochistic games of Bully (2001) to the hard-core dysfunctions of repressed suburbia in the sparsely seen Ken Park (2002), Clark has returned time and again to the lives of subversive teenagers. It's a subject the artist first captured in Tulsa, his 1972 photographic book of youthful transgression.



Clark's latest film is Wassup Rockers, a gonzo odyssey of Latino teens trying to escape Beverly Hills. This time around, the director takes a kinder, gentler approach—more Alice in Wonderland, less Caligula. A scruffy and laconic Clark, 63, sat down recently in his Soho office for a chat about social nonconformity, porn-infected imaginations, and the fine line between childhood and maturity.

What drew you to Latino skater boys in South Central L.A.?

Where these kids lived is dangerous—there are street gangs everywhere and drive-by shootings all the time. But they seemed to have more fun than anybody, even though they didn't drink, they didn't smoke pot, and they didn't want to conform to gangster style and hip-hop. Every Saturday I took them skating and fed them—I hung out with them for over a year.

How did you think up the story for Wassup Rockers?

The first half of the film is all based on the kids' lives. And then I wanted to take them on an adventure out of South Central, so I just started goofing on stereotypes of Beverly Hills and laughing and mixing genres. It's just all over the place—documentary, action chase, adventure, slapstick and dark humor.

How was it to work with so many nonprofessional actors?

Basically, I took these kids off the street and made them into movie stars. Their process was to be wild all the time, to be themselves all the time. It was a crazy, undisciplined shoot, to say the least. It made the crew crazy. It was the hardest film I've ever made.

For the upcoming omnibus film Destricted, you interviewed teenage boys about pornography and then filmed one of them having sex with a porn star.…

And it turned out to be an educational film. All these kids born after 1980 have grown up with pornography. It's so available to them. And my film is about how it infects people. Kids see that, and then they think they're supposed to pull out and come on the girl's face—and then that becomes the norm. I thought that was amazing.

The sex in Wassup Rockers is surprisingly tame compared with your other films. Ken Park includes autoerotic asphyxiation and an uncensored teenage three-way.

Ken Park had explicit sex to the max. But how do you make something sexy without being explicit? That's why I show the kids in Wassup Rockers eating candy after sex. Sex and sugar—at that age, what else do they need?

Why are you so drawn to teenage sex in your movies?

I hope there's a reason for it in my films. In Ken Park, the kids aren't being fulfilled by their families—the parents are just using the kids to fulfill their own needs, and the kids are getting nothing. But the kids have their friends, and that keeps them from committing suicide. So they have sex in the best possible light. It's a temporary redemption—some kind of hope.

Is there something especially appealing about 14-year-old boys?

That age is that moment in time that happens to all of us: We're growing up, but we're still kids. What goes on then is really important for the rest of our lives.

What do your children and grandchildren think of your films?

They like them.

Did you worry about your kids when they were teens?

I'm worried about them right now—I'm worried about them crossing the street. It never stops.

Stephen Garrett, Time Out New York / Issue 559 : June 15, 2006 - June 21, 2006