Shooting up, playing with guns and sex: This is what the teens in Clark's low-life American almanacs were shown doing -- all of it long before the likes of Nan Goldin and Gus Van Sant exploited such grimy gutter pearls for art's sake. But Clark was not off to the side with a camera. He was living the life. After "Tulsa," the National Endowment for the Arts awarded him a grant toward his next project, the even more explicit "Teenage Lust," but that had to wait while Clark did a stretch in Oklahoma's McAlester Penitentiary for a 1976 parole violation.

His troubled life and the fractured lives of his friends provided his first material, and he's been working the same disturbing vein for decades now, though he's moved from art books to cineplex fare. In "Teenage Lust" Clark reproduced a typewritten passage (all lowercase), signed "1974 Larry Clark," in which he recalls,

i always wished i had a camera when i was a boy. fucking in the backseat. gangbangs with the pretty girl all the other girls in the neighborhood hated. the fat girl next door who gave me blowjobs after school and i treated her mean and told all my pals. we kept count up to about three hundred the times we fucked her in the eighth grade. i got the crabs from babs. albert who said "no i'm first, she's my sister."

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So she gave me the pistol. I held it on them, and then I pistol whipped the main guy. I pistol whipped him across the house and he fell into the bathroom and fell on the shitter. And I shot him. In the arm. I just went ... I could have just as well gone through his head. So the other guys split.

Clark's struggles with heroin addiction, gunplay, sex and the dark side seem ever present. In a recent interview with the art journal Coagula, he asked: "Everyone gets their first blowjob, why can't you photograph that?" He finds beauty, or at least fascination, in the illicit and even the depraved. Perhaps film was a natural and safer progression for one with such a ravenous gaze.

Following "Kids," a brutal, elegiac tale of skateboards, sex and substance abuse, Clark could do no wrong in the eyes of the teens and art-house types who embraced him. But many others simply found his lurid visions of teenage intercourse, spliff smoking and random violence exploitative and voyeuristic. And who can blame them? Clark delights in serving up crotch shots of girls who look like your babysitter, or tableaux vivants of skate punks ingesting poppers by the bowlful. With Clark, there's no middle ground: either you think he's aqualung in the park eyeing the tykes, or he's an artist on par with Robert Mapplethorpe, Lou Reed and Cindy Sherman.

Clark's foray into the slightly more mainstream realm of Hollywood-style crime drama produced the funny but uneven "Another Day in Paradise" (1998). Now he's back with "Bully," the true story of a group of bored Florida teens who turn on the neighborhood terror, stab him more times than Caesar and leave him for gator bait in the Everglades. Clark makes the local Pizza Hut look like an Edward Hopper painting and gives this pack of sex- and drug-addled ruffians the full-out "Macbeth" treatment. Start squirming -- "Bully" is the mirror you don't want to look into.

In "Bully," the parents come off as completely clueless. Do you think that's specific to this story, or do you believe that is generally true of American parents?

There's that thing in this country where we just want our kids to be happy, and there's the tendency to avoid confrontation. These kids are in their rooms; the parents are in the den watching TV. The kids will get up, go make a sandwich, grunt and go back and slam the door -- just being teenagers, you know? I guess if they're in their rooms, at least the parents know where the kids are. Maybe they don't want to know what's going on in there.

In America, it's all about the kids. In other countries it's not about that -- it's all about struggle, and putting food on the table. Only in the wealth of this country do you have the opportunity to lay around and smoke pot all day, go surfing, hang out and so forth.

You make that world look so appealing that there's a real element of voyeurism involved. It's so lush that you just want to dive in.

That's the dilemma of growing up in this country. That's why it's tough on kids today to have the ambition to follow their dreams. It's so much about money now. The biggest fear of kids today is not having $3 million by the time they're 22 years old. It's really bizarre. I don't think it used to be that way.

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