A Young Man With an Eye, and Friends Up a Tree
作者 Philip Gefter
来源 www.nytimes.com
Team Gallery, New York
Ryan McGinley's “Dakota Hair, 2004.” He is to receive the Young Photographer of the Year award at the International Center of Photography’s Infinity Awards.
IN the beginning Ryan McGinley was known for pictures of his young downtown Manhattan friends. By day he photographed them running, skateboarding, moving, always in motion. By night they were partying, having sex, taking drugs, living fast.
Mr. McGinley in his Canal Street studio.
“Untitled (Kiss Explosion), 2005,” by Ryan McGinley, who says of his photographs: “I’m making the art for me first. I’m making it because these are the pictures I want to see.”
“Tree No. 3, 2003,” one of the photographs Mr. McGinley made in Vermont using friends from New York City.
“BMX, 2000.”
“For me the reason to go out to a party was to photograph,” Mr. McGinley said about those early pictures, which are as playful as they are voyeuristic, straddling a line between exuberance and disorientation.
Motion is a visual aspect of his work, and his career has been equally fast moving. At 24 he had his first show at the Whitney Museum of American Art; the next year P.S. 1/MoMA exhibited his new work. Now Mr. McGinley, not yet 30, will be honored as Young Photographer of the Year next week at the International Center of Photography’s Infinity Awards dinner. So much attention so fast hasn’t seemed to faze him.
“I’m just a photographer, not a movie star,” he said during a recent conversation in his bright, meticulous studio on the Lower East Side, adding that it’s not as if he is recognized by strangers walking down the street. “I’ve worked really hard. I’ve devoted my life to this. I’m not feeling any expectation from anybody else. I’m doing it for myself. I’m making the art for me first. I’m making it because these are the pictures I want to see. I’m making pictures that don’t yet exist.”
The Chelsea gallery owner John Connelly included Mr. McGinley in “Bystander,” a 2002 show he organized at the Andrea Rosen Gallery to spotlight the next generation of photographers. The participants included young photographers who documented the spontaneous activities of their friends in their own environment, a decided contrast to the constructed imagery of Gregory Crewdson, Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Jeff Wall.
“I saw something more casual, immediate and sincere,” Mr. Connelly said about Mr. McGinley’s work. “One picture, of the bicycle taken from above, stuck in my mind. I wanted to put it in the show.”
Reviewing that show in The New York Times, Holland Cotter wrote that “it will be good to see more” of Mr. McGinley’s work. The treatment of gay male bonding “feels refreshingly direct and immediate, autobiographical without being narcissistic,” Mr. Cotter added. “Among other things it’s part of a new approach to the visual depiction of gay life in art.”
The skateboarders, musicians, graffiti artists and gay people in Mr. McGinley’s early work “know what it means to be photographed,” said Sylvia Wolf, the former curator of photography at the Whitney, who organized his show there. “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.”
Mr. McGinley began taking pictures during his junior year as a graphic design student at what was then the Parsons School of Design. “I became obsessed with photographing,” he recalled.
Obsessive might also describe Mr. McGinley’s rigorous method of working. From 1998 to 2003, when he lived with friends in Greenwich Village, he took Polaroid pictures of anyone who visited. He wrote the name of his subject, the time and the date on each Polaroid, then fastidiously placed them on the wall. Eventually the apartment walls were covered with tidy Polaroid grids.
Now every one of his Polaroid portraits is archived by date in 300 black binders that line the shelves of his studio.
In 2000, while still a student at Parsons, he mounted a do-it-yourself show of his pictures — called “The Kids Are All Right” — at 420 West Broadway, a SoHo building that once was home to the Castelli, Sonnabend and Mary Boone galleries. At the time the building was being renovated, and Mr. McGinley used an empty area under construction for his show.
Employing his graphic design skills and technological proficiency, he produced a desktop book with 50 of his photographs. He sold 50 books at the show for $20 each and sent another 50 to artists he admired — including Larry Clark, Nan Goldin, Jack Pierson and Wolfgang Tillmans — and to magazine editors.
The enterprising idea struck him as logical. “No one knows who I am, so I’ll send out my books,” he said.
Index magazine responded with an assignment to photograph the musician Momus in Berlin.
“I was so nervous,” recalled Mr. McGinley, who was only 21 at the time. “It was the first time I had to take photographs of someone I didn’t know, and it was scary trying to make it look like pictures of my friends. First I asked if he would take his shirt off, and then if his girlfriend would take off her clothes down to her underwear.” They did.
Time and experience have made him bolder. Esquire recently assigned him to shoot Robert Frank, known as a photographer who waits for the moment. Mr. McGinley, who shoots as much as he can in the belief that “editing is just as good as shooting,” said he was aware that Mr. Frank was irritated by him. “I just started shooting, and I could tell the sound of the shutter going off was driving him nuts, like the sound of a machine gun.” Paradoxically Mr. McGinley is a beneficiary of the way Mr. Frank changed photography in his day: the authentic moment, the sense of motion, the anarchy of form within the composition.
Ms. Wolf, who became aware of Mr. McGinley when a curatorial assistant at the Whitney put a copy of “The Kids Are All Right” on her desk, said his use of printed material is typical of his techno-savvy generation. But his graphic design background, she added, sets him apart from other artists. “The attitude of getting your work out there,” she noted, “straddling photographic art and graphic art, certainly got his work in front of me.”
Mr. McGinley’s early work and desktop books anticipated the YouTube-MySpace phenomenon of intimate visual diaries created for public consumption. While the confessional and voyeuristic nature of his work may be representative of his generation, what distinguishes him from a personal blogger or online visual diarist is the rigor of his artistic output and his ambition.
“I’m interested in reaching the masses with my work,” he said. “It’s one of my goals.”
The work he began after the Whitney show was significantly different. In 2003 he rented a house in Vermont and invited groups of friends from New York, some of whom he had met at downtown clubs, to spend a week at a time in the country. With his guests as models in a variety of unexpected situations, his images captured their spontaneous behavior.
“I put a trampoline in the middle of a field,” he said, giving one example. He photographed the group walking naked from the house through the woods to the field and then jumping on the trampoline. For another series he spent an afternoon clearing branches from a tree and that night directed his friends to sit together naked in it. And he used an underwater camera to photograph his friends in the lake.
Like his earliest works these images were documentary. He was a fly on the wall. But then he began to direct the activities, photographing his subjects in a cinéma-vérité 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.”
The last two summers Mr. McGinley made pictures on cross-country trips, driving with groups of eight friends, plus two assistants, in two vans. He did research to plan the cinematic settings — including swimming holes and bungee-jumping sites — in which he placed his friends. He assembled booklets with pictures from old physique and nudist magazines to show his models and get them in the mood to pose comfortably and spontaneously for the camera. During the road trips Mr. McGinley shot 20 or 30 rolls of film a day while his two assistants filmed the entire process.
The group of friends changed at each coast, as did the route they traveled between New York and California. Mr. McGinley paid each model a day rate and paid for everyone’s food and lodging, as well as the flights home. “The trips are like small film productions,” Mr. McGinley said. “For a three-month trip it comes close to $100,000 for everything.”
The activities in which he places his subjects, and the sense of motion he captures in his pictures, might have a source in his own activities as a teenager: “I was a snowboard instructor after school, and I was skateboarding at 12 or 13,” he said. “I’d come into the city to skateboard downtown in the Financial District, and I’d end up at Astor Place.”
The communal experience, a theme running through all of Mr. McGinley’s work, mirrors his New Jersey upbringing as the youngest of eight siblings. “I grew up very American,” he said. “There were always people around. We’re a totally a touchy-feely family.”
Recalling how much he enjoyed those familial moments, Mr. McGinley talked about the spontaneity he seeks to project in his images. “My photographs are a celebration of life, fun and the beautiful,” he said. “They are a world that doesn’t exist. A fantasy. Freedom is real. There are no rules. The life I wish I was living.”
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