Ryan McGinley (born October 17, 1977) is an American photographer living in New York City who began making photographs in 1998. In 2003, at the age of 25, McGinley was one of the youngest artist to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He was also named Photographer of the Year in 2003 by American Photo Magazine. In 2007 McGinley was awarded the Young Photographer Infinity Award by the International Center of Photography.
Ryan David McGinley, born in Ramsey, New Jersey, is the youngest of 8 children. From an early age his peers and mentors were skateboarders, graffiti writers, musicians, and artists that were considered to be on the fringes of society. He moved to the East Village in 1998, and covered the walls of his apartment with Polaroid pictures of everyone who visited him there.
McGinley had his first public exhibition in 2000 at 420 West Broadway in Manhattan in a DIY opening. His first book of photos, The Kids Are Alright (2002), was handmade and distributed to people he respected in the art world and sold at the exhibition. One of these books was given to Sylvia Wolf who ushered his work onto the walls of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
“The skateboarders, musicians, graffiti artists and gay people in Mr. McGinley’s early work ‘know what it means to be photographed,’ said Sylvia Wolf, the former curator of photography at the Whitney, who organized his show there. “His subjects are performing for the camera and exploring themselves with an acute self-awareness that is decidedly contemporary. They are savvy about visual culture, acutely aware of how identity can be not only communicated but created. They are willing collaborators.”
“People fall in love with McGinleyʼs work because it tells a story about liberation and hedonism: Where 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.”
Ryan McGinley has been long time friends with fellow downtown artists Dan Colen and the late Dash Snow.
” ‘I guess I get obsessed with people, and I really became fascinated by Dash,’ says McGinley, who shares a Chinatown loft a few blocks away from Snow’s apartment with Dan Colen, whom McGinley has known since they were teenage skateboarders in New Jersey.
Since 2004, Ryan McGinley’s style evolved from documenting his friends in real-life situations towards creating settings where the situations he envisions can be documented. McGinley shoots 35mm film and makes his photographs using Yashica T4s and Leica R8s. McGinley has drawn much inspiration from the film by Terrence Malick, Days of Heaven.
“Like his earliest works these images were documentary. He was a fly on the wall. But then he began to direct the activities, photographing his subjects in a cinema-verite mode. “I got to the point where I couldn’t wait for the pictures to happen anymore,” he said. “I was wasting time, and so I started making pictures happen. It borders between being set up or really happening. There’s that fine line.””
In an April 2010 article in Vice Magazine, photographer Ryan McGinley identified Gilles Larrain as one of his early influences with his book Idols (1973).
“Photography is about freezing a moment in time; McGinley’s is about freezing a stage in a lifetime. Young and beautiful is as fleeting as a camera snap–and thus all the more worth preserving.”
