Tulsa

Tulsa is Larry Clark’s first book, a record of sex, violence and drug use among young people in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in black-and-white photographs made between 1963 and 1971.

Clark was a Tulsa native and a drug user during those years, and has said he took the photographs as a participant rather than a voyeur. The book first appeared in 1971 from Lustrum Press, the imprint owned by Ralph Gibson. Grove Press issued it in November 2000 in hardcover and paperback, both at 64 pages. The paperback is the edition catalogued here. Luhring Augustine, Clark’s gallery, says he achieved both fame and notoriety with the book.

Clark was born in Tulsa in 1943 and learned photography as a teenager by assisting his mother, a door-to-door baby photographer. He turned to feature films with Kids in 1995 and went on to direct Another Day in Paradise, Bully and Ken Park. His other photobooks include Teenage Lust (1983). He received a National Endowment for the Arts Photographers’ Fellowship in 1973, and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris held his retrospective Kiss the Past Hello in 2010.