My World: Ryan McGinley At Work and Play (A Memoir and Essay written by George Pitts)
Ryan McGinley seems taller to me today than in his scruffy skate punk years in the late 1990s when he was a design major at The Parsons School of Design. Not that he ever was a punk, given his genial yet clearly driven nature.
As his former professor and fellow photographer, I had the opportunity to witness the young wunderkind and how he put his name out there in culture via his DIY practice of making little desktop books of his photography, which he sent to his subjects, friends, artists he admired, and magazines he liked. That McGinley was a graphic design major (rather than a major in Photography) figured decisively in his quick-witted ability to distribute his desktop book, “The Kids Are Alright,” at a time when computer technology was opening up more direct possibilities to market one’s self without the aid of intermediaries. Those little books filled with the raw often delirious antics of his generation steeped in skateboard culture, smoking weed, casual sex, and a rabid lust for kicks, struck a chord with various constituencies: his own raucous peer group, graffiti culture, queer culture, fashion/general interest/and zine media, and most critically, the art world.
McGinley’s work reminded older hipster generations like mine, that every subculture yearns for a voice, and a platform upon which to throw down its gauntlet. And that he did, with pictures that seemed rushed and documentary in their style, but which were often rigorously rehearsed and haphazard only on the surface. There is often a methodology to his most apparently naturalistic pictures, to induce his subjects to reach for the images in his head. “In my work,” says McGinley, “to make things look very casual and very real, it takes a long time, it’s an investigation. . . and basically what I’m searching for is to find that moment when things are just very real, and it’s like the camera wasn’t even there, just like you’re hanging out with your buddy, you’re laughing, falling…”
When he was in my class, McGinley’s name was just starting to generate a buzz that was spreading, like wildfire among the arbiters of style, and perhaps like a virus, to his detractors, who resented his output, and his readiness for one so young, to be honored with a dazzling succession of exhibitions that came his way, first at The Whitney Museum, where he was feted as the youngest artist to ever have a solo exhibition at the museum, and soon after, at P.S.1, where his photographs in their degree of variety and hypnotic activity, were seen as an advance on the work in the Whitney show.
Around 2001 McGinley was the Photo Editor at Large for the influential and perversely twisted free magazine, Vice, the maverick youth bible, which often ran his pictures along with the likes of Terry Richardson, and Punk porn pioneer, Richard Kern. I was working at Vibe magazine, as photography director, and teaching part-time at Parsons, which made for little leisure activity, and subsequently I missed out on the increasing sightings of my student, as he carved his way into downtown notoriety as a kind of tireless party animal, who, via the camera he always carried on him, documented his life and times as he partied. McGinley had friends of all kinds: the graffiti and skate kids, downtown artists, striking and vividly talented lesbian friends, adult patrons, civilized and caustic gay friends, fashion denizens, and legions of straight friends, who appeared to be his most constant company.
Although often compared to the aesthetics of Larry Clark, and Nan Goldin, McGinley’s pictures seem fundamentally different in the emotional texture they impart: spirited, silly, and almost innocent by comparison. With a close reading of the layers of feeling in his work, one can arguably make a stronger case for comparisons to Nudist cultures, and poets of pantheism such as Walt Whitman. “One of my favorite things about making photographs, is that when you get back a roll, it’s like getting back a little present, and if I knew what I was going to get every time, photography would be so boring,” he muses, on his process, which vigorously embraces chance, and a lack of control, that he still finds are essential elements in the success of his photographs.
In McGinley’s world, people don’t look so stunningly beautiful that it distances the viewer from identifying with the high jinks in motion in his work. Despite his professed need to create his world above all for himself, the viewer is afforded ample room to dream in his playful, constructed Eden.