If there is one area in which I am failing on this course it is clearly a lack of consideration of other photographers work. This is my 41st post in my Social Documentary Blog and yet only the 2nd that actually addresses the subject of other photographers. I think there are a couple of reasons for this, the main one simply being time, not only do I have precious little of it, but looking at a writing about photography is very time consuming. This is rather sad because one of the aspects of studying photography has been a realization that I love the medium and get a real thrill out of seeing original work by the greats of the medium. I am an avid collector of photobooks, a week never goes by without something arriving from Amazon. My goal has always been to consider one artist each week and write about my feelings about their work, it is just not happening - so here goes!
Larry Clark's Tulsa is not an easy book to look at. I first came across images from the book in the recent exhibit of American photography at the modern art museum in Munich. The exhibit was largely reminiscent of photographs featured in the New Topology exhibit of the early 70's, however, with the inclusion of additional artists such as Eggleston, Winogrand, Friedlander and in particular Larry Clark. Clark was represented by a short row of 8x10 photographs, original prints taken from Tulsa. These were hung on their own against a vast white wall. There was a visible shock reaction as people studied these images. They were very different from the other material in the exhibit, primarily different plays on the landscape; these presented a visceral study of a descent into hell. Two photographs reached out and attacked the viewer, a pregnant woman shooting drugs, adjacent to an open coffin containing a newly born. This neatly summarized Tulsa, fascinating voyeuristic photographs possessing a terrifying narrative.
In a sense it is in a similar vein to Nan Goldin's work, an intensely involved study of a severely dysfunctional group of people, however, where Nan clearly loves many of the subjects of her narrative this cannot be said of Larry Clark. In his photographs teenagers mix guns with speed and sex, the outcome inevitable. The images are starkly black and white, there could be no colour here, the world he portrays is black and white, life and death, heaven and hell. He is involved, after all he is there, but the photos are not made with love of the subject, he simply seems to be chronicling them, the edit intended to shock rather than invoke empathy.
This is, however, Social Documentary at its best, the images expose late 60's small town teenage culture, kids driven by boredom into the excitement of living on the edge, and then falling off. It is not a study of "The Other", Clark is part of this, he was one of the speed freaks, injecting drugs as he took these photographs. When Robert Frank made The Americans in the late 50's he was exposing the American dream for what it was, Clark turns that dream into a nightmare.
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