Larry Clark American b.1943
David Keith Asleep, 1975

£2,750

Silver print
Signed (verso)
20cm × 30.5cm (image size) (37.5cm × 46.5cm framed)

Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1943, Clark is an American photographer, filmmaker, and writer renowned for his raw, unvarnished portrayals of youth subcultures.Clark learned photography at an early age while assisting his mother, a traveling baby portraitist.He formally studied photography at the Layton School of Art in Milwaukee from 1961 to 1963 before serving in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. He achieved widespread notoriety with his groundbreaking 1971 photo book, Tulsa.The black-and-white photobook documented the dark underbelly of his hometown social circle, exposing explicit scenes of adolescent drug abuse, casual violence, and sexuality.Unlike conventional photojournalists who observed from the outside, Clark was an active participant in the culture he photographed, giving his work a uniquely intimate, visceral quality.

He followed Tulsa with other photo collections, including Teenage Lust (1983) and The Perfect Childhood (1993).In 1995, Clark transitioned to filmmaking with his controversial directorial debut Kids (written by Harmony Korine), which captured the chaotic, risky lives of New York City teenagers.He went on to direct several independent feature films, including Another Day in Paradise (1998) and Bully (2001). Clark's work sits in the permanent collections of major global institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

David Keith Asleep, 1975 is an original black-and-white gelatin silver print created during the transitional period between Clark's seminal book Tulsa (1971) and his later monograph Teenage Lust (1983)