Ryan McGinley

Ryan McGinley (born October 17, 1977) is an American photographer living in New York City.

As a teenager, McGinley was a snowboard instructor at Campgaw Mountain, NJ, and competed in the east coast amateur circuits from 1992 to 1995.

Influenced by the death of his brother in 1995 due to HIV/AIDS-related complications, McGinley is vocally passionate about raising funds for HIV/AIDS awareness and treatment research.

He enrolled as a graphic design student at Parsons School of Design in New York in 1997.

McGinley began making photographs in 1998.

In 1998, he moved to the East Village, and covered the walls of his apartment with Polaroid pictures of everyone who visited him there.

As a student at Parsons, McGinley began experimenting with photography.

In 1999, he put these early images together in a handmade, self-published book called The Kids Are Alright, titled after a film about The Who.

McGinley had his first public exhibition in 2000 at 420 West Broadway in Manhattan in a DIY opening.

One copy of The Kids Are Alright was given to scholar and curator Sylvia Wolf, who later organized McGinley's solo exhibition at the Whitney.

In an essay about McGinley, Wolf wrote, "The skateboarders, musicians, graffiti artists and gay people in Mr. McGinley's early work 'know what it means to be photographed. [...] 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."

While he was a student at Parsons, McGinley was also the acting photo editor at Vice magazine from 2000 to 2002.

McGinley has been long time friends with fellow Lower Manhattan artists Dan Colen and the late Dash Snow.

McGinley said of Snow, "I guess I get obsessed with people, and I really became fascinated by Dash."

Ariel Levy, writing in New York magazine about McGinley's friend and collaborator, Snow, said, "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."

McGinley's early work was primarily shot on 35mm film and using Yashica T4s and Leica R8s.

In 2003, at the age of 25, he was one of the youngest artists to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

He was named Photographer of the Year in 2003 by American Photo Magazine.

Since 2004, McGinley's style has evolved from documenting his friends in real-life situations towards creating envisioned situations that can be photographed.

He casts his subjects at rock ‘n’ roll festivals, art schools, and street castings in cities.

In describing the essence of youth and adventure central to McGinley's work, Jeffrey Kluger wrote in TIME, "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."

In 2007, McGinley was awarded the Young Photographer Infinity Award by the International Center of Photography.

In 2007, critic Philip Gefter wrote, "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.'" This transition to creating work with an emphasis on heavy pre-production is embodied in McGinley's famous summer cross-country road trip series.

In 2009, he was honored at The Young Collectors Council's Artists Ball at the Guggenheim Museum.

In 2009, McGinley returned to the studio as he began experimenting within the confines of traditional studio portraiture.

This was also the beginning of what would by 2010 become an all entirely digital photography practice.

The result was his 2010 exhibition, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, at Team Gallery in NYC, where he displayed his first collection of black and white nudes.

This series marked a significant shift in the style and production of McGinley's photographs.

His continued work within the realm of digital studio portraiture eventually evolved into his Yearbook series.

A 2014 GQ article declared McGinley, "the most important photographer in America."

McGinley was born in Ramsey, New Jersey, and is the youngest of eight children.

From an early age his peers and mentors were skateboarders, graffiti artists, musicians, and artists that were considered to be on the fringes of society.

In a 2014 feature, GQ wrote, "His road trips, legendary among city-dwelling creatives under 30 (they all know someone who knows someone who went on one), have been annual summer occasions for almost a decade. McGinley and his assistants start planning the journey in January. They consult maps, newspapers, travel books. It usually starts with a specific desire—wanting to shoot kids in a cypress tree with Spanish moss, say—and the trip itself is plotted according to where such a setting can be found."

As McGinley continued this series, he began incorporating different elements into his photos, such as shooting with fireworks, animals, and in extreme locations like caves.

In conversation with filmmaker Gus Van Sant, McGinley described his practice of making photographs on the road and outside of his New York City based studio, "Such a big part of what I do is removing myself and other people from the city. Taking people to these beautiful and remote locations, being together for long periods of time, getting that intimacy, and doing all these intense activities together every day. In a way, it's like a bizarre summer camp or like touring in a rock band or traveling circus. It's all those things combined. Just taking everyone out of their element so you have their full attention."

Team Gallery describes the 2014 installation as, "(...) a single artwork that consists of over five hundred studio portraits of some two hundred models, always in the nude, printed on vinyl and adhered to every available inch of the gallery's walls and ceilings. The installation's effect is hugely impressive in its standalone visual power, an enveloping entity flooding the entire space with bold color and form. Although the sheer abundance of available images renders a total "reading" impossible, there is never any sense of incompleteness, as each individual image functions autonomously, granting the viewer access to a delicate, once-private moment."

Yearbook is a traveling exhibition, and while it has evolved in size and application process, it has been exhibited internationally in various forms in San Francisco, Amersfoort, Basel, and Tokyo.

Throughout his career, McGinley has worked with various high-profile charities.

At the 2014 amfAR Gala, a photograph donated by McGinley was purchased by Miley Cyrus, who narrowly outbid Tom Ford, for a record breaking price.

Also in 2014 McGinley photographed Ines Rau, a transgender person, fully nude for a spread in Playboy magazine called "Evolution."