"The Untold Story Behind Larry Clark's 'Tulsa'" by Danielle Jackson

Among the most influential photobooks ever published, Larry Clark’s Tulsa (1971) conveys little sense of place. In its near-ecclesiastic treatment of life and death, Clark’s tight interiors of teenagers shooting up and acting out appear at once personal and broadly familiar, a commercially appealing vision of rebellion removed from the city that gives the book its name. Yet Clark’s images, far from being universal, belong to a particular history that is still unfolding.

At the same time that Clark photographed Tulsa, between 1962 and 1971, his hometown was upended by a series of federal, state, and local policies, chief among them the construction of an interstate highway that segregated the neighborhoods of Clark’s youth from the rest of the city. At the Greenwood Rising history center, in Tulsa, the construction of the Crosstown Expressway is considered the death blow to the city’s historic Black neighborhood nearly fifty years after a horrific race massacre. However, a racial-justice lens tells only part of the story. Tulsa can help us understand how so-called renewal policies have failed residents on the wrong side of the city’s economic divide.

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