Can a nude tell you what year it is? People say this decae was a blur: 2009-2019. If it wasn’t a blur, it was fragmented. Bush to Obama to Trump. The recession and Occupy Wall Street. Black Lives Matter. Gay marriage. Grindr. MySpace ended where Facebook began while Tumblr and Instagram transformed our relationships with images, and with each other.
The photos in this book could almost be timeless. Without clothes or a city view, history blurs. You can’t hear the music we were listening to or the conversations we were having. Maybe you can tell the decade from the nail art, the body hair, the jewelry, the HRT beauty, the diversity, the scars, or from the piercings and tattoos (the stick and pokes, the gay tattoos, the face tattoos...). Maybe the faces give it away. A lot of the people in these photos changed culture and defined a moment. The photos themselves contributed something, working to redefine beauty standards and exhibit the spirit of a new Downtown New York.
The photos kept my spirit alive. Shot over the course of ten years, from January 2009 to December 2019, the casting was my vision of Downtown New York. Not everyone lived Downtown of course. Bushwick was the new Williamsburg. People were in Bed Stuy and Ridgewood. The neighborhood around my Chinatown studio was renamed Dimes Square. Skaters who mobbed up around Dimes, the restaurant, named it that and it stuck. There are skaters in this book and artists, actors, activists, chefs, stylists, filmmakers, educators, meme collectors, comedians, multigenerational New Yorkers, and kids who were just around— every contribution you can imagine that makes up “Downtown.” The casting was a web. Models would recommend their friends, then those friends recommended other artists. In the end, you get a cohort, a Yearbook.
The common age in the book is about twenty-five. A lot of the models were becoming artists when they were photographed. They came to be with art. And with the gays. I always tried to bring my queerness into the image. My queerness is my essence. Sometimes, I’d photograph people two or three times for the project, capturing them along a journey: a gender journey, a weight journey, a tattoo journey, a mother’s journey, a recovery journey...
I set a lot of people free on their nudity journey. The way we shot, full nudity was optional. Models could do shirtless only, opt for a side view, or wear a thong. Through retouching and cropping, we could imply nudity while honoring people’s boundaries. It was a lot of people’s first nude shoot. Shooting nude was out of a lot of people’s comfort zones and many came, they said, because of this. They wanted to try something new or open up in a new way. Some of those people went on to model nude for other photographers and in their own artwork.
Nudity itself changed over the decade. Between dick pics, thirst traps, cell phone cameras and selfies, Snapchat, Grindr, hookup apps, and later, OnlyFans, sharing nudes became more common in the 2010s. But it wasn’t without censorship. “Your post has been removed for violating Community Guidelines.” I lost my first Instagram account because I posted nudity. Over the years, so many people had their Yearbook photos taken down and even got kicked off the platform because of them. (Maybe this is why people used to call me “the King of Tumblr”—nudity flourished on that platform until 2018.) “Free the Nipple” tried to counter IG censorship. We later learned that the algorithm was racist, classist, ableist, and fatphobic. It boosted select bodies, while discriminating against others.
This Yearbook is sex positive, queer and trans affirming, body positive, and class conscious. The nudity is about community— witnessing one another in our diversity, lifting each other up, and finding freedom and joy in vulnerability. This is what community looks like.
People came as themselves. We had no hair stylists or makeup artists, it was just me, a choreographer, an assistant or two, and the models. Everything in the room was considered. The temperature. The music. The lighting. We always had these tools on hand: snacks, a Makita fan for blowing hair, a mini trampoline, a changing tent, disposal robes, and rolls of Colorama seamless paper. The paper was the model’s space. No one else walked on it. We’d always say, at the end, “Thank you for coming and sharing the space with us.” Everyone got paid and ran off and spent their checks right away.
Compulsive, repetitive. Shooting every month for a decade. Taking a thousand frames to get one picture. Each photo adding up to a total picture of our time in Downtown New York.
By the end of the project, I only knew people by their IG names: golden Polaroid, Rochelle fat leopard, Jarlos, fat Albert 420 . . . Phone addiction: that’s the 2010s. Yearbook weekends were a break from looking at social. We’d start shooting in the morning. Nine hours later, I’d be so satisfied and wiped out, high off the energy, tired from being on my feet. The goal was to capture someone in a flow state. The project’s choreographers, Luisa and Brandee, both had such vibrant energy and could get people there. I liked to be a fly on the wall between the choreographer and the models, the camera and I becoming so small and nimble, the self-consciousness a camera can imply wouldn’t apply. Then a genuine energy exchange could happen. I’d get to a point of being so present and connected, I could anticipate the model’s movements almost before they happened, as if in slow-motion; that’s how you get the shot.
My studio in Chinatown, where most of these photos were taken, was above a fire station and next to a Chinese wedding photography studio. We had a fake business sign on the front door that said “Life Adjustment Center.” Telfar Clemens was in the building. He was winning major fashion awards and making the bag of the decade when he was our neighbor. The building was filled with artists, designers, and musicians. It was like the Chelsea Hotel of Chinatown. I remember watching the Freedom Tower go up from outside my window 2011-12-13. Hurricane Sandy fucked up the city in 2012. The power went out in the studio for a week and I had to postpone a Yearbook shoot. Otherwise, we shot every month for a decade, the intercom and siren of the fire station bleeding through the walls, remixing the music we were playing.
Music set the tone for every shoot. At the start of the project, we played a lot of Gaga’s “Born This Way,” Die Antwoord, Björk, and psych rock: Ty Segall, Tame Impala, Mac DeMarco, Ariel Pink... Sky’s “Everything Is Embarrassing” played nonstop for what seemed like years. To get models to jump around, we’d listen to Offspring’s “Self Esteem.” Mid-decade, the repeat albums were Drake’s “If You’re Reading This...,” all the Lanas, and Solange’s whole album. Rihanna’s “Anti” carried us through 2016-2017-2018. By the end of the project, the models were requesting a lot of Azealia.
It was important to me to get the Yearbook models onto the walls of museums and galleries. “The Gang’s All Queer” and they belong in those spaces, just as they belong in this book; to be seen, honored, and valued. When it came to installing in an art institution, I was inspired by New York’s wheatpaste advertising, printing the images big and layering them up the wall. As the work traveled to San Francisco, Basel, New York, Tokyo, Seoul, Denmark, Abu Dhabi, London, La Termica in Spain, and Australia, this is what we did.
In Abu Dhabi, I wasn’t allowed to show any nudity, so I mostly showed headshots. I wanted it to be subversive, so I only chose queer models for that installation. It was cool to be in the UAE and have hundreds of queers looking back at the viewers. In London, my exhibition opened on March 20th, 2020, the day the world shut down. The work sat there, installed, with no one to see it. The Yearbook was in quarantine, just like everyone else.
How to end a project? The Yearbook really feels like Before the Pandemic, a decade leading up to this world changing event. It also started right after Obama had been elected president. So much happened during this bracket of time. Necessary uprisings. A queer revolution. Petra Collins and Jari Jones blew up, my sisters. People moved in and out of New York. Stores closed, parties moved locations. Inside of my studio, we could keep certain things constant. Overall, the throughline of the Yearbook is joy—finding freedom, joy, and authenticity with each other and capturing the essence of that joy in an image.
We lost some important people along the way. Adam Perkins, Chris Glockson, Sara Anne Jones, CJ Jorgensen, White Ring’s Kendra Malia, Rad aka Lighter, Tommy Playboy, Brett DeGroot, and Eva Evans. Sudden deaths, young deaths, the passing of talented, beautiful individuals. When I look through this book, I hear their voices and their stories.
This is a book of memories. If this yearbook has a school, it’s the school of one another. No matter what decade it is, art and community can be made and they have to be made. They’re made through listening, witnessing, holding space, and giving back. Art and community are what carry me through change, through losses and successes, aging and rebirths, project to project, year after year.
RYAN MCGINLEY