[Man Seated in Armchair Aiming a Handgun Before American Flag]

For over forty years, Clark has been making raw and often explicit images of teenagers. Most recently he has explored this subject matter as the director of the motion pictures Kids (1995) and Ken Park (2003). Clark was himself deeply immersed in the culture of sex, drugs, and violence as a teenager. This photograph belongs to a series of images of the artist's friends made between 1963 and 1971 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Many of those he depicted were dead by 1971, the year that Clark published his signature book, Tulsa. The book became one of the most important photographic publications of the 1970s and remains especially influential for a younger generation of photographers and artists.