Ryan McGinley

Ryan McGinley was born in Ramsey, New Jersey, in 1977. He received ICP’s 2007 Infinity Award for Young Photographer. He had a solo exhibition at MoMA PS1 in 2004 and participated in Greater New York 2005 and Into Me/Out of Me. His self-published book The Kids Are Alright (1999) helped establish his early reputation, leading to a Whitney Museum solo exhibition when he was twenty-four, then the youngest artist to receive one there.^*1

McGinley’s themes include youth, friendship, performance, queer and downtown subculture, freedom, risk, intimacy, staged spontaneity, and the myth of escape from the city into nature. His early work photographed friends, graffiti writers, skateboarders, musicians, and queer young people in intimate color images. Later he staged nude or semi-nude bodies outdoors in the form of road trips, producing images that appear spontaneous but are carefully organized.^*3 He worked from within his own social world, treating subjects not as distant documentary objects but as collaborators. The later outdoor works transfer the energy of downtown youth culture into a mythic American landscape. His early 2000s reception overlaps with interest in youth subculture, queer visibility, DIY publishing, skate and graffiti scenes, and the boundary between diary-like photography and staged art photography.^*1 ICP links him to a confessional lineage including Nan Goldin and Wolfgang Tillmans, while the road-trip works also converse with American road photography, the nude in landscape, and countercultural myth.^*1

ICP described McGinley’s portraits as revealing youth subculture through an honest, confessional eye and noted his status as the youngest artist to receive a Whitney solo show. The critical meaning of the work lies in the tension between spontaneity and staging. The photographs appear to happen naturally, but their meaning depends on subjects actively participating in the construction of youth as an image.^*3