Ryan McGinley

Skate Videos, Zines, and Downtown Self-Representation

McGinley recalls making skate videos of his friends from around age fifteen and becoming as interested in the moments before and after a successful trick—when people joked, waited, and talked—as in the trick itself^*17. After moving to New York, he photographed friends, lovers, skaters, musicians, and graffiti artists with whom he shared rooms and nights. This circle included queer people. Here, “queer” refers to forms of sexuality and relationships that fall outside norms centered on heterosexuality and a male-female binary; the term describes the social world in which McGinley and many of his friends and lovers lived.

The people he photographed were aware of the camera, proposed poses and actions, and participated in deciding how they would appear.^*10 McGinley has also described working within an intimate group accustomed to being photographed.^*17 Their participation reduced the sense that a photographer was simply collecting youth culture from outside and allowed the friends’ self-staging to enter the frame. The intimacy of the early work came from physical proximity and a shared understanding that the pictures were being made together.^*1

For the 1999 self-published edition of The Kids Are Alright, McGinley handled the photography, editing, reproduction, and distribution himself, first gathering images from his immediate world into a single zine. By the late 1990s, small-run publishing, skate videos, music magazines, fashion magazines, and personal websites had expanded an environment in which young audiences were also image makers. Ivan Vartanian places the book within this dispersal of media and chain of self-representation.^*20 Sending the book directly to photographers, editors, and curators connected downtown’s small-scale circulation to the Whitney Museum and MoMA PS1.^*4

McGinley’s 2003 solo exhibition at the Whitney marked the point at which a self-published book passed among downtown friends entered a museum. Large prints of nighttime rooftops and interiors lined the walls, and images once shared within a local social circle were received in a public viewing space as works that spoke for a generation of youth culture.^*9

The MoMA PS1 solo exhibition that followed in 2004 coincided with McGinley’s transition from intimate early snapshots to outdoor work begun in Vermont. As institutional recognition grew, his subjects expanded from an existing circle of friends to participants assembled for trips organized around photography.^*3

After Goldin: Images of Life from a Generation Shaped by the AIDS Crisis

McGinley has said that Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency showed him that the bohemian life he inhabited could become the subject of photographs.^*17 Goldin edited love, dependency, illness, and death across long spans of time, while Tillmans treated friends, clubs, magazines, and art exhibitions as parts of the same visual culture. McGinley’s early photographs are close to this lineage, compressing several years of a social circle into a densely edited book.

The death of his older brother Michael from AIDS formed part of the background against which McGinley photographed young bodies in motion and visibly alive.^*15 Chris Kraus links the reception of The Kids Are Alright to a story about young people still making free time for themselves in New York after the AIDS crisis and September 11, as the city became increasingly corporate.^*19 Images of running, swimming, and embracing presented queer life through more than illness or victimhood, while also contributing to an idealized image of youth as brief and passing.

“Pseudofiction”: Making Real Events Happen for the Photograph

In 2003, McGinley invited friends to a house in Vermont, set up a skate ramp and trampoline, and created starting points for actions such as climbing trees, entering the water, and running. Chris Kraus identifies this period as a shift from recording urban daily life to constructing situations on a larger scale.^*19 McGinley called scenes that genuinely occurred but would not have happened without the purpose of making photographs “pseudofiction.”

Diary-like snapshots strongly convey that the photographer was present within an ongoing life. Staged photography associated with Jeff Wall and Gregory Crewdson designs spaces, figures, and lighting before exposure, making that design a central premise of the image. McGinley chose participants, places, routes, and prompts for action, then left the form of a jump, laughter, a fall, or a change in weather to the people and the site. His principal construction was an environment and span of time in which participants could act repeatedly while he continued to photograph their responses.

The actions in the pictures were genuinely performed by the participants, yet they also arose from a production plan. The work’s sense of lived reality comes from a process that includes itineraries, trust, fatigue, and repeated shooting. Aaron Schuman likewise discusses the way spontaneous observation and constructed production operate within the same body of work.^{*18 *8}

The Road Trip as a Working Environment for Unscripted Responses

For the cross-country road trips that began in 2005, McGinley arranged the participants, two vans, prospective locations, props, film, and travel schedule in advance. Schuman notes that each trip followed casting and location research and was structured around places suited to particular scenes.^*18 A single photograph might look like an improvised escape, but behind it was a production system designed to keep making such moments for weeks.

In wilderness areas and rivers, terrain and action established new physical conditions for the shoot. Water temperature, the height of rocks, darkness, smoke, fireworks, and long-distance travel altered posture, breath, fear, and fatigue. Nudity reduced the information about occupation or fashion supplied by clothing while making age, build, and skin color more visible. Nature served as an image of freedom and as a set of material pressures acting on the participants.

In Tree #1 (2003), young people are dispersed among the branches, and the arrangement of trunks, leaves, and skin creates a group portrait.^*5 Color shifts produced by expired film and flash move the carefully organized shoot away from the uniform finish of commercial photography, giving the journey hues closer to private memory.^*4 Planning, physical strain, and the contingencies of film operate together within the image.

From The Kids Are Alright to I Know Where the Summer Goes

The Kids Are Alright moves at close range through nighttime interiors, rooftops, bathrooms, and streets, condensing the pace of a life in which friends came and went. Its editing avoids a catalog of biographies and builds a sense of shared time through recurring faces, bodies, rooms, and graffiti. The self-published format also made the route from the subjects’ social world into art institutions part of the work’s history.^*6

In I Know Where the Summer Goes (2008), the continuous daily life of the city gives way to a journey with a defined beginning and end. Bodies leaping from rocks, nude figures running through fields, and people surrounded by smoke or fireworks were photographed on different days, then edited through the book’s sequence into the memory of a single summer. The photobook maps a journey while gathering scenes made for the camera into an image of youth shared across a generation.

Morrissey Concerts and Studio Portraits: How Environments Shape Behavior

At Morrissey concerts between 2004 and 2006, McGinley turned his camera toward the audience as well as the singer, photographing tears, shouts, outstretched hands, and expressions close to fainting. On the road trips, the photographer’s prompts initiated bodily movement; at the concerts, music and the crowd performed that role. McGinley selected moments when an environment altered behavior and expression, rather than building portraits around an explanation of inner character.^*7

Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (2010) used a white studio and monochrome photography, removing travel, nature, and group action from the frame.^*14 Each person faces the camera alone, and the portrait depends on slight movements of the face, shoulders, and gaze. Set beside the outdoor work, the series shows that McGinley’s subject extended beyond a particular youth culture to the ways people respond to a camera under specific rules and environmental conditions.^*2

In Relation to Clark, Goldin, and Tillmans

Larry Clark followed youth culture as a social environment marked by drugs, sex, and violence. Nan Goldin edited the lives of friends and lovers into a long-running slide show. Wolfgang Tillmans placed portraits of friends, magazine work, club culture, and abstract photographs within the same exhibition space. McGinley’s early work belongs to this lineage through the photographer’s shared life with his subjects.

During the road-trip period, intimacy developed through weeks spent together by participants, supplementing friendships that predated the shoot. Goldin’s camera became part of a life already underway; McGinley’s camera became one reason for setting a journey in motion. Intimate photography expanded from the record of a shared life into a form in which photographic production generated a new temporary community.

The difference from staged photography is most evident in the production environment. McGinley prepared on a large scale, then photographed through repeated actions, failures, and periods of rest. His main object of control was the time and place in which participants could respond. The itinerary allowed him to keep photographing events that changed on site—laughter, falls, fatigue, and silence.^*10

From Zines to Advertising: Images That Look Like Participants’ Own Records

From the late 1990s into the early 2000s, zines, personal websites, blogs, and early social media widened the circulation of photographs made by young people themselves. Vartanian discusses McGinley’s early work within a visual culture of dispersed media and linked acts of self-representation.^*20 Fashion magazines and advertisements of the period also used images that looked as though participants had photographed their own trips and parties. McGinley worked at the production scale of staged photography—casting, location research, and extended travel—while presenting the finished images at a distance close to the participants’ own snapshots. The preparation of constructed photography and the look of self-representation circulating through zines and personal websites meet in the same work.

Bare feet, summer, flash, and road trips were widely borrowed by advertising and fashion photography and repeated as signs of “freedom.”^*11 Images that copy only this appearance leave the extended casting, communal living, travel, and formation of trust outside the frame. In McGinley’s photographs, itineraries, funding, transportation, film management, and relationships with participants support the repeated production of moments that appear light and unburdened.

In Japan, the 2016 exhibition BODY LOUD! at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery brought together McGinley’s early New York pictures, road trips, concert photographs, and studio portraits. Its structure showed how different shooting conditions—urban friendships, staged outdoor situations, crowds, and a white studio—altered the behavior of the figures behind the shared imagery of youth and nudity.^*12

The exhibition materials traced changes in McGinley’s work since 1998 through approximately 150 works and emphasized the continuity between snapshot intimacy and large-scale staging within a single career.^*13

The production model McGinley helped establish manages itineraries, participants, places, actions, and film while continuing to photograph without fixing each person’s response in advance. Daily schedules are organized for the camera, and actual behavior overlaps with self-staging performed in awareness of being photographed. This structure developed in parallel with a visual culture in which, through blogs and social media, everyday life increasingly became something photographed, shared, and performed again.^*16