“I wanted to present the way kids see things, but without all this baggage…You know…they’re living in the moment not thinking about anything beyond that and that’s what I wanted to catch. And I wanted the viewer to feel like you’re there with them — you can be there fucking, smoking dope, having sex…”
Larry Clark created a self-portrait through photographing the lives of others in Teenage Lust (1983). His second photo series (something of a follow up to Tulsa, his first) includes self-portraits from his youth in Tulsa, family photos, portraits of hustlers in Times Square, New Mexican hippie commune teens, and photographs of sex, drug usage and violence in Tulsa. Teenage Lust is unfortunately out of print and rare to find, but selling on ebay for $650… Damn!
“I always felt that when I was photographing, I had a psychic need to see this, to photograph this. And I think if somebody else had been doing this work, and if I could have seen these pictures anywhere at all, then there would have been no need to make them.”
