Ryan McGinley
'People fall in love with Ryan McGinley's work because it tells a story about liberation and hedonism,' wrote Ariel Levy in New York magazine in 2007. 'Where Nan Goldin and Larry Clark were saying something painful and anxiety-producing about kids and what happens when they take drugs and have sex in an ungoverned urban underworld, McGinley started out announcing that "The Kids Are Alright", fantastic really, and suggested that a gleeful, unfettered subculture was just around the corner - still - if only you knew where to look.'
And yet, despite all this, McGinley remains solidly identified with youth. 'Photography is about freezing a moment in time; McGinley's is about freezing a stage in a lifetime,' wrote Jeffrey Kluger in Time in last year. 'Young and beautiful is as fleeting as a camera snap - and thus all the more worth preserving.'
But that's all right by McGinley. 'I use young people to illustrate my pictures because of their spirit', he says. 'It hasn't been broken yet. They are at a point where anything is possible and I think that spirit comes through in the photographs. They're wide-eyed and up for anything. Teenagers are my ideal viewers. If the kids know who you are, then you're good.'
Early acclaim
It's fair to say he started young. He shot to fame in 2003 with his Whitney exhibition, the youngest artist ever to get a solo show there, and American Photo Magazine promptly named him Photographer of the Year. In 2007 he picked up the Young Photographer title at the ICP Infinity Awards.
He started shooting stills and video of his skateboarder friends while in his mid-teens, focusing on the in between moments when they were just 'being silly and playing tricks on each other'. The youngest of eight children, he built up a close-knit gang of friends when he moved to New York's Parsons School of Design to study graphic design in 1995, his Lower East Side apartment becoming, as he puts it, a 'flop house'. His friends took drugs, had sex and generally hung out, and were happy to be photographed throughout.
'His subjects are performing for the camera and exploring themselves with an acute self-awareness that is decidedly contemporary,' commented Sylvia Wolf, the former curator of photography at the Whitney who organised his show, in an article in the New York Times 2007. 'They are savvy about visual culture, acutely aware of how identity can be not only communicated but created. They are willing collaborators.'
McGinley's connection with Wolf started in 2002, when a copy of his first book, The Kids Are Alright, ended up in her hands. McGinley produced the book himself with an Epson printer, binding the pages together with double-sided tape and making about 100 copies in total. He sold around 30 copies of it at a self-produced exhibition of the same name in New York in 2000, then sent the rest out to galleries and publishers he admired. Another copy ended up with Jesse Pearson, then-editor of Index Magazine, but soon to become editor of Vice. A long and fruitful relationship was born.
'Jesse sent me over there and Vice was one of the first magazines to publish my photographs,' says McGinley. 'They published my first cover, which was a photograph of (artist) Dash Snow. They would let me do anything and I used to curate their photography section. I started their annual photo issue and brought in a lot of people who now are a staple there - photographers like Roe Ethridge and Richard Kern and artists like Dan Colen.
'I was organising a portfolio of a photographer's work each month for two years, and Vice would run 10 pages of the person's work. Tim Barber became the photo editor after I left and he brought a great aesthetic to the magazine. I don't know if it's a "movement", but we've all been working together for so long, we're a family.'
Barber now runs the influential online gallery, TinyVices.com (and curated an exhibition of work from it for the New York Photo Festival in 2008), and McGinley is a keen fan. 'I put all my work on my website and on TinyVices.com, so everyone can see it. Some art people can be snobs, but that's not my scene. I think the work should transcend on all levels.'
Close friends
McGinley stands by his title, The Kids Are Alright, but sadly two of his closest friends and favourite models from this era overdosed on drugs - Dash Snow and Lily Woods (she was buried with one of McGinley's shots of her). Heroin is one drug you need to stay away from, he says, but he adds that drugs haven't been a part of his photography since 2002. And although his long associations with magazines such as Vice continue, his work has evolved along the way too. After the Whitney show he headed into the great outdoors, and nature has been a theme in his work ever since. He's inspired by the sense of scale he gets from the vast American landscape, dwarfing his human subjects, but he also likes the idea of the extended road trip, and has organised an outing every year since 2003.
'I admire photographers who have travelled America, like Robert Frank and Richard Avedon, but it's also linked to movies like Easy Rider and books like On the Road,' he says. 'It's like a band touring the US, pulling over to the side of the road and finding something. Meeting locals and depending on the kindness of strangers. My brother passed away from AIDS in 1994 and since then I've always believed in living every day like it's your last - really having adventures and feeling alive. My work is more about escapism. Never not working and always having fun doing it. Always in a different state, in a cave, jumping off cliffs, flying through the air, in an airplane, looking for new models to shoot.'
The trick is, he says, to find the right balance between something half-staged and the spontaneity of a moment. 'My lens is a shield. It removes me enough to be an observer. I also have to be an insider. I have to know my subjects inside and out to know what kind of performance I can get out of them, what they are capable of doing. I work in the same way a director of a movie works. My work is well thought-out. I do a lot of research and try to find the right people to work with far in advance before a project. I also work with some friends I've been shooting for several years.
'When you have a great model it becomes a collaboration and they can always offer you something you never would expect. They also set the stage for the other models who are new as to how far they will go with me to make a new and exciting image. I also do a lot of image research beforehand to find the landscapes and locations that interest me. But I'm also interested in letting people run free. I don't want to make work that is too much thought out. Losing the idea of adventure or surprise would be boring. It's exciting to go searching for new people and places.'
And, he adds, he still subscribes to the rebellion of youth. 'I've always felt the word "alternative" relates to me,' he says. 'Being gay is automatically alternative. I feel that everything I do, in my life or in my photography, is unconventional. I love breaking rules and norms. I wouldn't want to be friends with anyone who is "normal". I like the element of surprise and risk and danger and excitement. Aren't all artists alternative? Making art is alternative. Aren't we all the freaks, geeks, and weirdos? I signed up for that lifestyle a long time ago.'
Cave art
For his latest project - which goes on show at Alison Jacques Gallery in London on 11 September - he's shot friends exploring caves, setting up a camera on a tripod to maximise the little light there is (or light that he creates). It's an abrupt change of direction technically speaking - his earlier work often focused on movement, and he says he used to shoot hundreds of rolls of film per day running alongside his models with his Yashica T4 or Leica R8, in search of 'that one image where the light, the gesture, and the composition meet up'.
'Movement will always be a big part of my work - if someone is in motion, I'm happy,' he says. 'But I wanted a challenge so I decided to do the cave project because I needed to slow my film. Shooting the cave pictures was like directing theatre - I had to pay attention to every little movement.'
His images, particularly his moving shots, draw on the 'snapshot' aesthetic popularised in the US by titles such as Vice and photographers such as Nan Goldin. McGinley has stated that he likes this style because it's so accessible but, he aims to combine its energy and spontaneity with 'all the elements that make up an artful, sophisticated photograph'.
He takes a similarly understated approach to colour and image-quality - a fan of grain, he shoots on ISO400, 800 and 1600 speed film, and he tries to emulate the distinctive colours of 1960s and 70s emulsions. 'In the cave photographs I tried to bring that back - that colour you get from Kodak Ektachrome film and dye-transfer printing, the kind of colours you see in a Paul Outerbridge or early William Eggleston photograph.'
He doesn't say it, but the colours are also reminiscent of 1960s porn and naturist magazines, another inspiration. His own work invariably features nudes too, but he says this is down to a spirit of liberation not prurience. 'I don't consider my work to be sexual,' he says. 'Maybe sexy, but not sexual. I only mention old porn because they couldn't show too much sex in the 1960s, so it's all just photos of nudes, and I like the look of people back then - they're natural and wholesome looking. I also love vintage nudist publications. Normal people doing everyday things in the nude makes me smile. I'm sure I'll do different things in the future, but I'll always love seeing people naked. If someone is nude they have my undivided attention.'
And, as he points out, nudes are much harder to date than clothed portraits, giving his images a certain timelessness. For as much as he's interested in freeze-frame action, and as much as he shoots the fleeting beauty of youth, McGinley also has one eye firmly fixed on the long term. 'I try to make a photo that you couldn't place in any time period,' he says. 'The cave series is the ultimate timeless backdrop because it hasn't changed for millions of years.'
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