A visual kick in the stomach: Larry Clark's "Tulsa"

Image taken from ArtJournal
Copyright Larry Clark
Image Taken From ArtsJournal
Copyright Larry Clark

Image taken from The New York Times online
Copyright Larry Clark


These few pictures here are only bits and pieces of the wall that is Larry Clark's "Tulsa". Made up of a total of 44 black and white silver gelatin prints, Tulsa is a series of photographs featuring members of Clark's household in Tulsa, OK in the late 1960's. Every one of these photographs are grouped tightly together to fill a wall, several feet both above and below eye level. The majority of these photographs feature one to two of these people as their focus, while capturing enough background to illustrate their surroundings, and furthermore, the atmosphere they inhabit. This atmosphere is like a punch to the back of the face when viewed in its totality. Some photographs are merely recordings of good times: A beautiful woman smoking; a long haired man in a denim jacket with a giant grin, a smiling tattooed man fishing on a serene lake. But these are not the photographs that stand out, they're not even the trend. Engulfing these good times are dozens of pictures depicting an intense lifestyle of constant party and heavy drug use. A man and a woman interrupting sexual intercourse for the man to inject heroin in the woman's arm; a woman lit by the lonely light on one high widow shown shooting heroin despite her obvious pregnancy; a man screaming in agonizing pain from a gunshot to the leg; a woman looking lost and forlorn, naked save for a sheet, lying in bed with a black eye; a funeral with a tiny open casket revealing an infant; that tattooed man from the lake sitting in front of a broken mirror with a look on his face that resonates with anyone who has ever felt contempt for themselves. The overall effect is to grab you, interest you, and hold you long after the shivers have started at the base of your spine. Even the "good times" photographs are somehow made dirty by all those horror scenes, because you recognize the same group of people over and over again. It makes you want to save that happy, beautiful girl shown smiling at a party before she becomes the pregnant junkie or the black eyed hopeless beauty. You want to let the man keep fishing before he smashes that mirror and hates himself, his life, his trap. But the resonating truth is that this happened before you saw this, before you drove over here, and if you're like me- before you were born. That's the real stomach turner- that the good times rolled right on into suffering, death, violence, and hate; that it happened just like this, recorded by Clark exactly how we saw it, and there's simply no saving for anyone to do. He just lets you into his life in a stunningly intimate way, as if you were invited to that nightmare of a party.
Clark created this series to present this life -his life- to America, 1971. To stand up and proclaim loudly that this is not only in New York, this is not only in L.A., this is not only among the horror stories you hear about in the paper. These are real people in rural Oklahoma, doing all the things you dream about, all the things you're afraid your kids are doing, all the things you would never dare to experience save a late night movie or a cheap piece of pulp fiction . To stand up and let them know: we're doing it all, and we did it before you got out of bed this morning.