Kids in America

FANFAIR

A LARRY CLARK RETROSPECTIVE

Peter Pan from the dark side, filmmaker-photographer Larry Clark has spent a lifetime immersed in the pimply hormonal hell of adolescence. From his groundbreaking 1971 book, Tulsa, documenting his own sex and drug misadventures in Oklahoma, through his iconic 1995 film, Kids, Clark has influenced a generation of imagemakers with brutal, beautiful, ever evolving portraits of innocence partially lost.

This month, a retrospective covering 40 years of Clark’s photography, film, and video fills New York’s International Center of Photography. “Part of the reason that Clark has had such a profound influence on younger artists and filmmakers is that he is working with some of the key issues of our time: the construction of identity in adolescence, censorship and the limits of sexually explicit imagery, masculinity and the roots of violence, the destructiveness of dysfunctional family relations, and the relationship between mass imagery and social behavior,” says I.C.P chief curator Brian Wallis.

“I couldn’t care less about the retrospective,” Clark from a cell phone while at work on the forthcoming Wassup Rockers—a. film he describes as action-adventure. “I’m always working, always doing new things. I’ve always been an artist; I’ve always had this need to make this stuff. I guess it gives me my sense of self-worth. I have no idea why I was put on this planet except to do this.”

A. M. HOMES