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.

Michael Nagle for The New York Times

Mr. McGinley in his Canal Street studio.

Team Gallery, New York

“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.”

Team Gallery, New York

“Tree No. 3, 2003,” one of the photographs Mr. McGinley made in Vermont using friends from New York City.

Team Gallery, New York

“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.”

Shooting Satrs in Focus: Terry Richardson

作者 Lee Carter
来源 hitmag.com

Nothing is too vulgar for the magazine world's Marquis de Sade, Terry Richardson, whose full-frontal photographs of supple body parts, often in orgiastic orchestration, can really grab ya. His uncompromising style has left a trail of sticky magazine pages from here to down there and inspired a generation of photographers to keep it real. Taken with an old Instamatic, Richardson's body of work has become one of fashion's most instantly recognizable, and sought after; his sizzling images have appeared in the pages of i-D, French Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, as well as campaigns for Gucci, Sisley and Armani Exchange.

The product of an unconventional childhood—divided between New York and Los Angeles, where his father, the eccentric 60s fashion photographer Bob Richardson, lives—Richardson continues to occupy a space in between, blending a New York fashion sense with L.A. street cred. Richardson sat down with LEE CARTER to reveal his soft spots for cinema, cars and naked skateboarding.

Lee Carter: Is Terry Richardson a New Yorker or a So. Cal. kind of guy?

Terry Richardson: I think it's not where you're from, it's where you are, and right now I'm in New York. I feel like a New Yorker.

LC: Do you have another place in New York, or do you call this studio home?

TR: This is it—home, everything. I like how you refer to it as the studio. The French call it le studio. A lot's gone on this couch, let me tell you.

LC: Uh, should I get up?

TR: No. Just kidding. Sort of.

LC: Do you still skateboard?

TR: The last time I went skateboarding I was hit by a cab. I got a bruised hip and my face was cut up. I realized I shouldn't be skating around the streets of New York City. Safety first. Now I have an indoor skateboard.
LC: You skate in here?

TR: Yeah, on my little skateboard, the best $6 I ever spent in a thrift store. We have naked skateboarding contests. That'll be the concept for a future ad campaign, naked skateboarding.

LC: Naked skateboarding would be one of your tamer concepts. Has there been a time when you felt you'd gone too far? Too explicit?

TR: No, but there are a lot of pictures that have never run.

LC: I was thinking on the way over here that you would be ideal as a celebrity photographer for Playboy. Or something raunchier like Penthouse.

TR: Well, I'm working on some top secret stuff out in LA.

LC: But you can tell me, of course.
TR: Let's just say I get a lot of offers. But I like putting sexual images in mainstream magazines, not porn magazines. With porn mags, you'll see penetration and people fucking and fucking, but it all looks the same after a while. Fashion can look the same, too. I like to be subversive, to push images as far as I can and still get them run. It's a challenge to see what I can slip in.

LC: Pun intended?

TR: I like to explore sexuality and people instead of just showing cum shots, fist fucking and whatever to shock people.

LC: Does that make you an artist?

TR: Maybe.

LC: I saw an art show of yours at Alleged gallery a while back. And the soundtrack was the sound of really vitriolic phone messages, but no one knew who it was. I found out later they were between you and your father.

TR: Actually, it was just my father. He bombarded me one afternoon.

LC: What provoked it?

TR: Who knows? It goes deep. Everyone needs to vent sometimes.

LC: Is he still taking photos?

TR: Don't know. I haven't talked to him in about a year. He's still kicking. He's a strong fucker.

LC: I'm waiting for your quote about how he still gets a hard-on every morning. I've read that everywhere.

TR: Do I say that a lot? He says it all the time to me.

LC: The first time I read it, he was 70 and still getting a hard-on, the second time he was 71, then he was 74. He'll be 100 and still getting boners. That libido must run in the family.

TR: Yep, it's in the genes.

LC: Pun intended again? Maybe you can do what Ted William's son is trying to do and cryogenically freeze your dad's body. There's something in his DNA that needs to be preserved.

TR: Yes and no. [laughs] He's one-of-a-kind. He can't be duplicated.
LC: Not even in you?

TR: A bit. That's what I'm working on in therapy, not to repeat the same patterns.

LC: Do you want to have kids?

TR: Yes. Kids are amazing, I think the best conversations I've had in the last six months have been with 3-year-olds. They're so direct and honest. They don't know about too much stuff yet.

LC: Think you'll be a good dad?

TR: I think so. But I'm still just an eligible bachelor right now. It's kind of nice. I can do whatever I want. I like the freedom and the time to myself.

LC: What's a typically date like with Terry Richardson?

TR: [yells out to assistants] Hey, what's a typical date like with Terry Richardson, as I refer to myself in the third person?

Assistants: Golf!

LC: I take it there's no corsage involved?

TR: No corsage. I guess I would say I'm part romantic. [laughs] I sound like a dating service. "I like walks on the beach at sunset, sushi and rock climbing." I'm actually quite shy.

LC: You're shy?

TR: I like daytime dates. I like to just do whatever, go to the beach, take a walk, get an ice cream cone. There's less pressure. I don't wonder whether I'm going to take her home. This is like the Dating Game. [sings theme song] "Bachelor #2, what's your star sign?"

LC: I hear there's a modeling agency in London that takes Polaroids of their girls and tells clients they're your photos.

TR: Excellent! That's funny. It's like sampling. A girl told me someone went up to her on the street once and told her he was me, and tried to get her to his studio. That's kinda creepy.
LC: Did it work?

TR: No. But I want to find out who the impersonator is. And I've heard people dress up like me on Halloween.

LC: It wouldn't be hard. Just throw on some glasses and grow mutton chops.

TR: And there's already a mask of me in the Sisley catalog.

LC: That's a mask? So anyone can be Terry.

TR: Yeah. You know, put it on and make some love, Terry-style.

LC: Wouldn't girls want the real Terry?

TR: Nothing wrong with fantasy.
LC: Do girls throw themselves at you?

TR: Sometime, but the sleazy photographer thing is cliché.

LC: Can I see the famous instamatic? You have two, right?

TR: Oh, boy. [gets cameras] They're old, they don't make them anymore.

LC: Have you ever used a digital camera?

TR: No. [Editor's note: Terry later used a digital camera to take his self-portrait seen on the first page, the first time he'd taken a digital photo.] I like the idea of having negatives and making prints, but I'm not against digital. We just learned how to scan, actually. It's very exciting, we can send people pictures. We had the scanner for 2 years, but never did anything. We finally had somebody come over last week to show us how to use it. We needed to know so we can start building my website, www.terryrichardson.com, which should be up and running later this summer.

LC: You'll be the master of your own domain name. What else are you working on?

TR: A book for Taschen. I've done three books before, but this one is more of a retrospective art thing. I guess it's a coffeetable book. That's such a cheap term for a book, so vulgar. Whoever invented that should be shot. It sounds like there should be a little holder for a coffee mug and an ashtray. So I'm doing that, editorials, ad campaigns and just taking tons of picture. I'm also taking off across the country this summer in my car, a suped up black '87 Buick. I love cars. They're beautiful, like art objects.

LC: Sexual, too.

TR: Exactly. My car is called Mandingo, like the old pulp novel about a Southern plantation that would castrate the male slaves, but they'd also have a breeder, the stud, that the white women would all want to fuck, too. It was made into a film in the 70s with Ken Norton, who played Mandingo, James Mason, Perry King and Susan George. It's excellent, like an exploitation of Gone With the Wind.

LC: Sounds like you're a movie buff.

TR: Yeah, I'm in the midst of writing a screenplay, too. I have to submit it in December. I'm still putting ideas on paper. They want a European art house thing, with lots of sex.
LC: You're just the man for the job. What's the first film you saw that really impressed you?

TR: Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Five Easy Pieces, Carnal Knowledge, Out of the Blue, Over the Edge. And early Nicholson. My dad took me to see all that great 70s American cinema, like Godfather. And I like all those Jerry Shatzberg films with their bleak, unhappy endings that started with Midnight Cowboy. They're anti-heroes because they're criminals, and they die in the end.

LC: Which was a new thing at the time, not wrapping things up neatly at the end.

TR: Oh, totally. Have you read Easy Riders, Raging Bull? It's about all those guys making those realistic films of the 70s.

LC: Which is, in a sense, exactly what you're doing.

TR: Yeah. Keeping it real, that's what the kids say.

LC: You're one of few photographers who can marry art and commerce. You can bring a lot of sexuality to a brand like Sisley and it seems right.

TR: My best pictures are improvisational. It's all about casting, especially with Sisley. If the cast is wrong, the whole thing is fucked. If you get people who know what's going on, who are into it, then you just let them go, let them get into their characters.

LC: How much do you have to prod them?

TR: A little, but the casting is where I do the big grill session to see who's comfortable. A lot of people are exhibitionists once you get them going. I've had people fuck on set, and suck, and fuck some more. And guys fucking, girls fucking, guys and girls, penetration. Sometimes I'll cast a couple if I want them to do it, but strangers have done it, too. That's why casting is so important. I can't make magic with just anyone! But I'm not going to connect with everybody. I've walked off sets a couple of times. I said I was going out for coffee, then I'd leave.

LC: Are magazines very controlling? Or do they let you do what you want since you're Terry Richardson?
TR: There's more freedom with magazines than advertising. But even European mags are worried about advertisers now. You can't work with a glossy and bring in all new girls. They want the big names. It makes it harder for new people to break in. Like I've always said, it's not who you know, it's who you blow. I don't have a hole in my jeans for nothing.

LC: How long have you been shooting the Sisley campaigns?

TR: About five years.

LC: What's the inspiration behind the fall campaign?

TR: It was the first time we went into the studio. We just wanted to do a shiny black thing. Next time we're going back on location, for atmosphere. I think we're going to shoot the next one in LA again.

LC: They're the most sexually-charged ads I think I've ever seen.
TR: Yeah, we tried to put a picture of a girl with little pompoms over her tits on a Sisley poster in Soho. This one [points at the catalog]. They said no because a little of her areola was showing.

LC: Or, as I like to say, hairy-ola.

TR: [laughs] I like that word. They said it was too sexy and it would be too close to a church and a school. It's all so silly and conservative.

LC: I didn't realize until recently that i-D runs an exclusive Sisley ad of you with each new campaign.

TR: We give them my self-portrait each season. It's not even in the catalog, just in i-D. I always look forward to it. Humor is good. I love to make people laugh from a photograph. I think that's the best compliment.

LC: Sex and comedy mixed together. You're sort of the Woody Allen of photography.

TR: Annie Hall and Manhattan are my two favorite films ever. To me, photographs are more about people than clothes. I'm not one of those photographers who says, "Ooh, that dress is just making me crazy."

LC: Think Woody ever went to rehab?

TR: What?

LC: I have to ask about rehab.

TR: Oh my god, where do you get the goods?

LC: I don't think it's embarrassing. It's common knowledge.

TR: Really?

LC: Sort of. Better to air it. Everyone's doing rehab these days anyway.

TR: Oh, I know, it's chic. I know so many people doing it.

LC: Silver Hill?

TR: No, somewhere in Pasadena. It was my first time. It really changed my life, made me really look at myself. It brings it all right down to simple things. It's nice to put your life on pause. Life is a beautiful thing. Before rehab I wanted to feel good all the time. "All things in moderation," as my mother always says. But a little excess can be good every once in a while.


from hintmag.com