Photographer Larry Clark’s muses

Instead of laissez-faire Paris, the American photographer and filmmaker Larry Clark could have been forgiven for thinking he was back home in Bible-belt Oklahoma. It is an understatement to say that Clark was disappointed by the Musée d’Art Moderne’s decision to ban under-18-year-olds from viewing his first major solo show in France.

“I think it’s just the stupidest thing in the world,” drawled Clark, still groggy-eyed from jet-lag. “I think it’s an attack on youth and on teenagers in general.”

The show, entitled Kiss the Past Hello, features more than 200 photographs from Clark’s 50-year career. There are black-and-white pictures from Clark’s groundbreaking books Tulsa (1971) and Teenage Lust (1983), replete with graphic images of sex, drug-taking and gunshot wounds, as well as a more recent colour series about teenage skate-boarders, entitled “Los Angeles 2003-2010”.

There are also two documentary films: one a recently shot 20-minute colour film Clark made about Jonathan Velasquez, a Venezuelan skateboarder from LA’s South Central ghetto; the other a never-before-seen, black-and-white, 62-minute film about teenage drug addicts that Clark shot in his hometown of Tulsa more than 40 years ago.

For Clark, who has spent his whole career using visual mediums to explore – his critics might say exploit – the ways teenagers are apt to experiment with their lives, the over-18 restriction rather misses the point.

“Kids have always liked my work because they see it’s not bullshit, they understand it,” he says. “They say maybe that’s not me, but it feels right, it’s not dishonest.”

When Clark’s first and most widely seen feature film Kids – about a day in the life of a group of sexually active New York teenagers – came out in 1995, the director used to go to movie theatres “just to watch the audiences”.

“I saw mothers bring their 13-year-old daughters to the film, fathers bring their teenage sons with them, because it opened a dialogue,” he says. “As a parent, if you sit your kid down cold and try to have a conversation about sex with them then their eyes just glaze over. It has to be an appropriate moment.”

Clark, the 67-year-old father of a grown-up son and daughter, is a trifle testy that we’ve arranged to meet in the main gallery of the Musée d’Art Moderne. My first question about a new wall collage he has made especially for the show is met by a silent scowl. “I don’t really want to go into it,” he mumbles.

We decide that it may be better for us to move from the gallery to some neutral office space. Clark, who is dressed from head to toe in black, lopes ahead, long-legged, shoulders hunched. A former Vietnam veteran, prison inmate and junkie (“once the needle goes in it never comes out”), he has a kind of coiled, unpredictable energy.

As a contemporary and admirer of Diane Arbus and W Eugene Smith, Clark is perhaps the last survivor to bridge the classic era of black-and-white photography and the present. Throughout his career he has cultivated an outlaw reputation as someone who never pulls his punches, either in work or play. This also conceals an inarticulacy about which he has always felt less vulnerable in the company of teenagers. His relationship with his father, a sullen man who helped his mother run the family photography business where Clark got his start, seems to be at the heart of this ungainly obsession with youth.

“I think my father was ashamed of me for being a late bloomer. I was very skinny and stuttered very badly,” says Clark. “I always wanted to be someone else, anybody else but myself. I see that in my work. I photograph a lot of these kids and I think deep down [my work] is about missing all of that, missing a normal childhood.”

It would, however, be unfair to describe Clark as an opportunist. Kamel Mennour, Clark’s gallerist in Paris, describes him “as a myth in the art world for having never sold out.” Clark’s stamp may be all over the fashion world in so-called “porno chic” and the work of designers such as Raf Simons and Hedi Slimane, but he himself has never shot a commercial or exploited his teenage subjects for purely financial gain. For many years he refused to let either of his most famous books, the harrowing and explicit Tulsa and Teenage Lust, be republished. He finally did a couple of print-runs with Tulsa 10 years ago, but Teenage Lust is still out of circulation and as such a valuable collector’s item. Earlier this year, at an auction at Sotheby’s in London, a single print from Teenage Lust sold for £7,800.

Clark has always frowned on a photo-journalistic approach and likes to describe himself as “a visual anthropologist”. For him, an anthropologist has to be part of a scene and not just standing off to the side taking photos. He spent nine years shooting the Tulsa book, and several months learning to skateboard (aged 47), so that he could keep pace with the non-professional actors he wanted to use in Kids.

After Kids – which was financed with the help of American film director Gus Van Sant – four more teenager-focused features followed. The latest, and Clark’s last film to date, is Wassup Rockers (2005), which starred Velasquez.

“It’s just a different way to tell a story and I’m a storyteller,” he says. “I’d done the books and I was telling stories in two-page spreads and I wanted to break away from that. I then started doing triptychs and then collages. When I’m doing a collage it feels to me like I’m making a film.”

Over a period of about two years Clark says he cut out every page of every American magazine featuring the actor River Phoenix. Some of these images he then employed in a collage that juxtaposed the preternaturally straight-laced images of Phoenix with Clark’s own photographs of tempestuous teenagers. Clark did something similar with Corey Haim, another teenage movie star, and his latest collage, which takes up one whole wall of the Musée d’Art Moderne, features Brad Renfro, the star of Clark’s movie Bully (2001). All three actors died from drugs-related problems.

Finally, Clark seems ready to talk about the collages. “That work was about the way [those actors] were portrayed in the media and what real life is really like,” he says. “I think the way they died had a lot to do with having that early fame, the money and all that media attention on them all the time.”

‘Kiss the Past Hello’, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, until January 2 2011. www.mam.paris.fr