Over the last several years, as the International Center of Photography in Midtown has moved away from the photojournalism roots of its founder, Cornell Capa, and more eagerly explored art photography and questions about the medium itself, it has staged several exhibitions that it considered challenging.

A Helmut Newton show in 2001, with giant, glossy, highly sexual portraits of mostly naked women, raised inevitable questions about the center's intentions. An exhibition last year of the horrific photographs taken by American guards at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq stirred a more complex critical debate about whether such pictures belonged in a museum.

But undoubtedly the most difficult show staged to date is the one that opened yesterday, the first retrospective of the work of Larry Clark, whose stark, intimate photographs and movies of teenagers having sex, shooting drugs and waving guns have been hugely influential but also widely reviled by many who consider them little more than pornography.

Brian Wallis, director of exhibitions, said the center decided to do the show in part because it spoke to the center's own evolution. Mr. Clark, 62, is seen as a bridge between photojournalism - as a youth he admired and tried to emulate the work of W. Eugene Smith in Life magazine - and the kind of raw art photography that has influenced Nan Goldin and many others in the art and fashion worlds. The show was also felt to be timely because many of the themes that run through Mr. Clark's work - teenage sexuality, cruelty, vulnerability and objectification - are being widely discussed and debated now.Full text NYTimes