New Jersey-born Ryan McGinley studied graphic design at New York’s Parsons School of Visual Arts. In 1999 he sent 100 magazine editors and artists he admired a 50-page book of photographs he had produced on his desktop computer entitled The Kids Are Alright. The book consisted of exuberantly bacchanalian images of his friends in New York City. In these images, fellow artists like Hannah Liden, Dan Colen, Dash Snow and Emily Sundblad masturbate, roll joints, tag walls, and scamper naked in the woods. Like Nan Goldin and Larry Clark, McGinley shot intimate portraits of friends far on the margins of social acceptability. But the humanity and poetry of his predecessors’ work came from the pathos, pain and gallows-humor in their images, whereas the grittiness in McGinley’s photographs glowed with the exuberant bliss of being young, hot and acting out. The day that Index magazine received the book, they called McGinley to fly to Berlin and shoot for editorial.
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As McGinley matures, he is proving that he was less a fleeting child star than a genuine art prodigy. The physical energy, contagious joy, and beauty coinciding with grime from his debut series remain consistent presences whether he is photographing Olympic swimmers for the New York Times magazine (a series exhibited during the summer of 2004 at Queen’s PS1, the Museum of Modern Art’s satellite space), kids in an adult summer camp setting that he constructs and orchestrates, or Morrissey performing.
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