The photographer and filmmaker Larry Clark once spent time in jail for pistol-whipping and then shooting a man. No doubt many viewers of his current retrospective at the International Center of Photography will feel pistol-whipped by his excoriating images. Punk – or unrefined, unvarnished truth-telling – is not an aesthetic with broad appeal, and Mr. Clark, whose most recent gallery show was appropriately, if somewhat hyperbolically, titled “punk Picasso,” has made a career of shoving unpleasantness in the face of the public.

Having learned his camera craft from his mother, a traveling baby photographer, Mr. Clark first gained notice in 1971 with his book “Tulsa,” which contained the following epigraph: “i was born in tulsa oklahoma in 1943. when i was sixteen i started shooting amphetamine. i shot with my friends everyday for three years and then left town but i’ve gone back through the years. once the needle goes in it never comes out.” When he wasn’t shooting speed, he was shooting black-and-white pictures of his friends – often while they were shooting speed.

Even with the enormous impact “Tulsa” made on other artists (it would be hard to imagine a world with photographers Nan Goldin or Ryan McGinley or, for that matter, Robert Mapplethorpe, without Mr. Clark’s influence), it still contains images that shock: a shirtless, pregnant woman pushing a needle into her arm; a woman sitting on a bed, a hand to her face, next to a pained man with his pants pulled down, revealing an accidental gunshot wound; a series depicting a man beating up and bloodying the face of a police informer.

All the pictures from the book are at ICP, along with a group of outtakes. And, although Mr. Clark doesn’t appear in any of the images, it is an autobiographical work – all of his efforts are nakedly, though obliquely, autobiographical. You feel the intimacy in every frame: He always gets his lens uncomfortably close to the action, close enough to sense the tears welling in the older man bent over a dead infant in its coffin and the loneliness on the face of his friend Billy Mann as he drives shirtless on a sunny day.

What nobody says about Mr. Clark, our celebrated poet of teen sex and self-destruction, is that he is also our pre-eminent photographer of emotion. Unlike Diane Arbus, another chronicler of 1960s-era freakdom, he is not interested in making formal compositions out of strange characters. His images are just as formally composed, yet he isn’t concerned with producing distanced, beautiful objects; he’s interested in the hurt, the loneliness, the anger, and, of course, the ardor his subjects experience.

Those unflinching glimpses of childhood passion have proven to be his most enduring subject and the most difficult for many of his critics. As a photographer, Mr. Clark’s reputation rests largely on “Tulsa” and his second book, “Teenage Lust” (1983). It’s graphic cover image tells much of the story: in the backseat of a car, a naked boy and a naked girl embrace, kissing and caressing each other between the legs.

Inside he begins with some family photographs, then turns his camera on shirtless and naked young men, 42nd Street hustlers who unzip to display their “wares,” other teens having sex or cavorting, as well as a gorgeous shot of a dog playing in surf. This being America, however, the most disturbing images are of teens with guns, blithely taunting death. In one, for instance, a boy poses in front of a dilapidated shack with a sawed-off shotgun, while his long-haired friend holds a pistol to his head.

Mr. Clark doesn’t capture subcultures or downtrodden youth; he shoots normal life as it is lived throughout our country – not by every child, but certainly in every community. As someone who grew up in a shiny, Eastern, upper middle-class suburb a world away from Mr. Clark’s Tulsa, I find none of his images alien or unfamiliar. And it is familiarity, I believe, that makes his work so uncomfortable.

In an excellent catalog essay, Jim Lewis points out that Mr. Clark’s images of, say, boys with erections are never homoerotic – they are merely forthright, for many excessively so. Parents everywhere know things that they never acknowledge to themselves or anyone else – that their daughter is having sex with her boyfriend, that their son is a drug-using bully. But, to my eye, Mr. Clark’s aim in baring these truths is not especially prurient; his discipline is honesty.

Consider the opening scene of Mr. Clark’s first film, “Kids,” which echoes the cover of “Teenage Lust”: In it a boy and girl, both in underwear, engage in one of the longest and most authentic on-screen kissing sessions in celluloid history. After seeing it, I remember thinking that, compared to Mr. Clark, other artists hadn’t managed to scratch the surface of adolescent passion.

Some will argue that adolescent passion is an itch that shouldn’t be scratched. To them I can only say: Don’t go to this show, and don’t watch Mr. Clark’s movies. Others will say he glamorizes drugs and sex, and, to some extent they are correct, though Mr. Clark’s images glamorize far less than your average fashion advertisement or many television programs. Mr. Clark almost always shows us the consequences of the actions he shoots: death, pregnancy, morbid deterioration. In contrast to the moralists, however, Mr. Clark depicts all his subjects with love, with palpable sympathy and caring.

Aside from the two books and selections from his released films – “Kids,” which I see as a masterpiece, and “Another Day in Paradise” and “Bully,” both strong efforts – the other work on view at ICP is largely ephemeral. There are some clunky collages, television interviews with troubled teens, and some color shots used as research for the films. Taken together, they provide a full picture of a difficult artist touched by genius.