Return

Larry Clark was 16 in 1962 when he and his friends started shooting Valo – a drug store nasal inhaler that contained a tremendous amount of amphetamine.

Clark returned to his hometown of Tulsa at 20 after two years serving in Vietnam. Here he graduated from amphetamines to heroin, and upended traditional documentary photography, by turning his camera on himself and his social circle, producing a ground-breaking series of raw and intimate photographs chronicling the disintegration of the American dream.

Clark’s deeply intimate images exposed the previously unseen lives of suburban American teenagers, living a transgressive, outlaw lifestyle, hanging out in crash pads and committing burglaries and armed robberies to score dope. A small number of these photographs would come to form ‘Tulsa’, a cornerstone of contemporary photography.

50 years on, Larry Clark has returned to his archive of vintage prints, crafting a powerful vision of his work from 1962-1973, to produce his new book Return, a meticulously printed, outsized monograph, which is as shocking today as it ever has been, even in a moment in which opioid addiction is more prevalent than ever before.