Ryan McGinley: Bodies in Motion

The New York Beginning

McGinley was born in Ramsey, New Jersey in 1977 and studied graphic design at the School of Visual Arts in New York, not photography. He began photographing in 1998 with a disposable camera, documenting the downtown Manhattan world he inhabited: artists, skaters, musicians, the inhabitants of a Lower East Side that was in the last years of being affordable and was producing culture at a rate that only becomes visible in retrospect.

He knew and photographed Ryan McGinley's downtown — Dash Snow, Dan Colen, the circle of artists who would later become collectively known and who were then simply a group of young people making things and living fast. The photographs from this period have the quality of evidence: something happened here, and someone was paying attention.

Ryan McGinley (2002), his self-published monograph, was photocopied and distributed by hand. It reached the Whitney Museum's photography curator through a series of connections that sounds improbable and was entirely typical of how things worked in that world. The Whitney gave him a solo show in 2003. He was twenty-three. He has not slowed down since.

The Road Trips

The work that made his reputation — the images most associated with his name — came from a series of summer road trips across the United States beginning in 2003. McGinley loaded a van with friends and film and drove, photographing bodies in landscapes that seemed designed to receive them: fields and rivers and mountains and open road, all of it bathed in American summer light.

The subjects are naked, mostly. They run through tall grass, swim in quarry lakes, hold sparklers against night skies, sit in the back of moving trucks with their hair blown back by the speed. They look exactly like the freedom they represent: young bodies, temporarily unencumbered, in a country that is, whatever its other qualities, very large and occasionally very beautiful.

The images are explicitly joyful in a way that photography rarely achieves without sliding into sentimentality. McGinley avoids sentimentality through velocity — the motion in the images, the sense that the moment captured is already moving beyond the frame — and through a quality of light that is beautiful without being pretty.

The Gay Sensibility

McGinley is gay, and his homosexuality is present in the work in a way that is worth naming specifically. His male subjects are photographed with a quality of desire — not predatory, not objectifying, but genuinely appreciative, specifically attentive — that distinguishes his male nudes from his female ones in ways that are visible even before you know anything about him.

His male subjects look at ease. They are comfortable being looked at by this camera, in this way, and that comfort is visible in their bodies. They are not performing for a viewer they find uncomfortable. The transaction is mutual.

This ease is not accidental. It is the result of trust — the documented fact of it, the way it shapes a body differently than a professional relationship or a paid assignment does. McGinley's subjects are almost always people he knows, people who are comfortable with him, people who understand what he is doing and consent to it in a full sense: not just technically, but in the sense of actually wanting to be seen.

The resulting images feel different from most nude photography for exactly this reason. The subjects are not displayed. They are present.

The Later Work

McGinley's practice has expanded from the early documentary work into more formally controlled photography: studio shoots, elaborately staged outdoor images, campaigns for fashion and sportswear brands. He has shot for Levi's, for Reebok, for the New York Times Magazine. He has photographed athletes and musicians and celebrities.

The later commercial work is beautiful and competent and lacks, necessarily, the quality of desperate aliveness that characterises the early downtown photographs and the road trip images. This is not a criticism. The early work was made in conditions — youth, freedom, a specific moment in a specific city — that cannot be replicated, and would be diminished by the attempt. What McGinley has done instead is build a formal language capable of carrying some of what the early work contained into more controlled contexts.

He continues to work prolifically. His books — The Kids Are Alright (2006), Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (2007), I Know Where The Summer Goes (2009), Yearbook (2015) — form a sustained document of what youth looks like when it is looked at with this quality of love and attention.

Why He Matters for BoysDo

McGinley photographs bodies the way [BoysDo](https://boysdo.com) believes bodies should be photographed: with genuine desire, with careful attention, without apology, and in the knowledge that the person being photographed has their own presence and their own agenda in the frame.

His work is the contemporary end of the lineage this platform is built on. Not the foundation — that is Mapplethorpe, earlier — but the living proof that the tradition is still producing images worth paying attention to. Young bodies, American light, the specific pleasure of looking at someone who is pleased to be looked at.

The road trips continue. The bodies are still running. The camera is still there.