Larry Clark at Rutkowski;68

Larry Clark, color photograph

By DAVID JAGER February 6, 2025

Larry Clark is a photographer and film maker known for his ability to infiltrate adolescent subcultures. He is probably most notorious for his controversial shock film “Kids”, often mistaken as documentary due to its loose, fly on the wall, spontaneous style. It was actually tightly scripted by a young 19-year-old Harmony Korinne, and it put Chloe Sevigny and Rosario Dawson in their first major film roles. The film documents the tragic debauchery of a protagonist who, in his misplaced sexual enthusiasm, unwittingly infects several teenage girls with AIDS.

Fascination with anarchic subculture has been Clark’s infamous calling card, and he has always stalked the edges of the contemporary art world as the visual Poet Maudite of youth gone astray. Now Clark has returned to Ruskowski;68 with a body of photographic work from thirty years ago. This series, taken just before the filming of ‘Kids’, covers the period from 1992-1995, mostly of youth engaged in their favorite activity: skateboarding in parks.

Clark has always instinctively understood that bucking social expectations is a luxury many youths prize over conformity. He excels at catching them just at these junctures of fledgling rebellion, the feral moment in which they cast off that mantle of civilization and take flight from the stifling confines of gravity. His subjects are always in search after little jaunts of anarchic freedom. He is interested in youth who display, to steal a phrase from Richard Hell, the ‘amoral charisma of nature.’

This is what marked Clark as a pariah when he first emerged on the scene as a photographer. The viewing public is wary of future adults caught in the act of straining against the shackles of model citizenship. Yet as a milieu it remains fascinating. The skate park is a petri dish where we can witness the incubation of a culture. There are no class distinctions in Clark’s photographs- these could be kids from the projects or scions of financial dynasties- all hegemony is dropped and governed the law of the skate park. It’s a “Lord of the Flies” enclave where boldness and acrobatics win the day.

What’s most compelling in these shots is the intensity. Delinquent oafs or not, his subjects are as laser focused as a tennis pro about to smash a serve at Wimbledon. He catches them blurred in midair, or zipping down a street, a solitary pursuit as serious as it is outside the realm of school or society. Part of the allure of skateboarding is its childlike purity, demanding nothing more than the direct challenges it presents to the adherents inside its world.

Which are considerable. Clark also shows us the social milieu, of skaters in the act of watching other skaters. The utterly riveted look, for instance, on the face of one subject, in his backward baseball cap and oversized Judas Priest T shirt, agog at something he is witnessing off camera. He is no doubt gaging a move they would like to master or think they could top. A fierce competition is at play.

What's equally interesting is the camaraderie to the side and in the background. A bit of banter, some tagging in progress on a building, easy smiles and commentary, social semiotics from a self-contained universe. You get a sense of this enforced insularity from another portrait. A gormless looking kid- heartbreakingly young- stands next to another young girl who is giving Clark a direct and malevolent glare. It’s a gate-keeping look, and one that is directly questioning the older man behind the camera and his intentions. Clark catches the intensity and gatekeeping, sure, but he also records the vulnerability as well, especially in his solo portraits. It is where he acheives some of his best work. 

Larry Clark, color photograph

That being said, the girl’s questioning glare has long been shared by the general public. Clark’s Bonafide’s, however, are authentic even as he is accused of being voyeuristic. His first collection of photographs, Tulsa, documents his own troubled youth as a delinquent and IV drug addict in Oklahoma. Like Nan Goldin in her ‘Ballad of Sexual Dependency”, Clark is always a nostalgic participant returning to the same haunting questions, the scene of his own crime. What makes children and teenagers rebel? Why do they turn to addiction and crime? What makes them form their own insular oases of discontent? What’s blatantly absent, however, is any moralizing. He is simply content to witness.

Clark is not alone in his investigations of skate subculture. There are the equally gritty and kinetic photographs of Tobin Yelland, which like Clark aim for that moment of supreme focus and solitary splendor that seems to epitomize the sport. Still, Clarks adherents are many, if the claustrophobically packed crowd on opening night was any indication. A mob of at least five hundred crammed into the venue and spilled out into the street. Many had the carefully worn, grubby street look Skate culture popularized back in the day. Scraggly goatees, Supreme hoodies, baggy jeans and baseball hats, spiffy kicks and knowing, laid back grins. Beer was plentiful, and many a courtly street style hug was being administered. A great reunion was in progress.

One of them, turning to me, used his blunt workmanlike finger to point out a scrawny kid in the background of a group shot. The kid, no more than twelve, looks off to the side, swimming in a T Shirt and shorts, looking half defiant, half forlorn. The man flashed me a big smile punctuated by a steel tooth.

“That’s me!” he said. WM

Larry Clark

92-95

Rutkowski;68

46 Cortland Alley, New York, NY

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