Art review: Tough and Tender at the National Portrait Gallery

When Larry Clark's film Ken Park was released in 2002, it was promptly banned in Australia and it was not widely shown in either the United States or Britain. The police shut down a protest screening in Sydney in 2003, and the prominent film critic and one of the organisers of the screening, Margaret Pomeranz, narrowly avoided arrest. Drug use, underage sex, violence and the skateboard sub-culture made the Australian film censors see red and, as far as I am aware, the film is still officially banned in this country, although widely available for private viewing.

Larry Clark, together with the photographers Robert Mapplethorpe, Warwick Baker, Rozalind Drummond, Nan Goldin, and Collier Schorr, as well as a video performance by Chris Burden, make up the cast of artists at the National Portrait Gallery's new exhibition, Tough and Tender.

It is essentially an exhibition about different constructs of sexuality among adolescents, especially those from the from the LGBT community. The vulnerability and the search for identity among young gay, lesbian and bisexual people is the prevailing theme in this show. The photographs by Clark and Mapplethorpe are the standout works in the exhibition and have been selected from the substantial holdings of both artists in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia.

Clark's mother was an itinerant "baby photographer"; he entered the family business at the age of 13 and became an intravenous drug user by the age of 16. In 1964, he was drafted into the American army and was sent off to serve in the Vietnam War. Drug use and Hispanic male hustlers feature in his early black and white photographs, made between 1963 and 1979 in New York and his home city of Tulsa. A selection from these has been included in this exhibition. The images from his 42nd Street series have the strange quality of appearing both candid and posed at the same time, as if the photographer momentarily distracted his subject and snapped the image. The subjects look directly into the lens, not menacingly or with confrontation, but with slightly puzzled and vulnerable expressions. They are sensuous and empathetic images with silky surfaces and rich tonality.

Mapplethorpe was the maverick photographer on the New York gay scene who died in 1989, aged 42, due to complications from HIV/AIDS. He was brilliant, inventive, prolific and diverse. Controversy surrounds his homoerotic work, but its nobility and profundity shines through. His long-term friend and frequent subject, Patti Smith, wrote movingly of his photographs: "Robert took areas of dark human consent and made them into art. He worked without apology, investing the homosexual with grandeur, masculinity, and enviable nobility. Without affectation, he created a presence that was wholly male without sacrificing feminine grace."

The eight Mapplethorpe photographs selected for this exhibition, including Sebastian (1980) and James Ford (1979), show a distilled and perfect beauty that has been exactingly lit, framed and observed. If Clark observed life as he found it on the street, Mapplethorpe elevated life to a position of high beauty and celebrated its eternal properties.

Baker is a Canberra-born photographer, who trained at the RMIT in Melbourne, whose selection of intimate photographs celebrate moments of introspection, while Drummond, in her recent photographs, hints at quiet alternative modes of being with her models generally caught from behind and shown as if lost in thought. The American photographer Goldin, known as the photographer of the drag queens, champions in her work the LGBT community and the drug scene and has developed a peculiarly "grunge" style in her work. Schorr's photography, especially after seeing her big show at the Whitney, I find the least authentic of all of the artists in the show, as she brings her skills as a commercial fashion photographer to images of adolescent youth, androgynous male figures and semi-naked children in military attire. It is all very glitzy, but skin deep.

The curator of this exhibition, Chris Chapman, has assembled a confronting show that questions identity and sexuality in an age that has lost innocence. There is a sense of tragedy and anticipation that runs throughout the exhibition, like a secret narrative that needs to be intuitively felt, rather than intellectually understood.