{"id":810,"date":"2026-07-04T11:07:18","date_gmt":"2026-07-04T11:07:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=810"},"modified":"2026-07-04T11:07:18","modified_gmt":"2026-07-04T11:07:18","slug":"ryan-mcginley-tries-to-photograph-what-it-means-to-be-alive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=810","title":{"rendered":"Ryan McGinley Tries to Photograph What It Means to Be Alive"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I remember seeing Ryan McGinley\u2019s breakout exhibition, \u201cThe Kids Are Alright,\u201d at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in 2003. He was just twenty-five\u2014one of the youngest artists ever to be granted a solo show at the Whitney. The pictures were frenetic snapshots of his raucous life: drug-fuelled nights that smeared into mornings; lithe nude bodies; puke and cum; the non-stop thrum of adventure. There was a pinch of Nan Goldin and a dash of Larry Clark in the images, but unlike the work of those forebears, which was freighted with the heavy weight of fast living\u2019s consequences, McGinley\u2019s pictures eclipsed any shades of darkness with a blazing exuberance. In his version of the city, the dust from Ground Zero had been shaken off, and everybody who was anybody was downtown being hot and bad. I was in college at the time, and certain that I would never be that cool.<\/p>\n

Read more American Idols<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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A few years later, McGinley\u2019s work took an Edenic turn. He and his friends would pile into vans and light out for the territory in the grand tradition of American road-tripping. McGinley photographed models cavorting naked (always naked) through sand dunes in the Mojave Desert and pine forests in Vermont, in a frigid ice cave in upstate New York and perched above a rushing waterfall in Tennessee. Fireworks\u2014plumes of smoke and pinwheeling streaks of sparks\u2014were often deployed to amp up the atmospherics, lending his scenes the feel of a barn-burning bacchanal. In McGinley\u2019s world, it seemed, the good times were always rolling, like some impossible perpetual-motion machine lubricated with youth, beauty, and sex, only now the device had been set to \u201cescapism mode.\u201d<\/p>\n

McGinley\u2019s newest body of work, \u201cNight Shift,\u201d which is currently on view at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in Soho, marks a kind of homecoming, in more ways than one. The exhibition is his first in New York in eight years, and the first project in decades to find him prowling the city in the wee hours, as he did in his not-so-misspent youth. (The title cheekily refers to the fact that all of the pictures were taken between nine at night and five in the morning, the party animal\u2019s nine-to-five.) Shot with jittery long exposures, aided by strobes and a small crew of assistants, McGinley\u2019s photos show subjects roaming through the sleeping city, hanging from the underside of a bridge or the back of a garbage truck, frolicking in the spray from an open fire hydrant, or wandering down a tangle of train tracks in a Long Island City rail yard. McGinley told me recently, during a conversation at Jeffrey Deitch, that a good portion of his attention in recent years has been taken up by L.G.B.T.Q. activism\u2014mostly attending marches and immortalizing them on film. He sees the new series, which features mostly queer models, as an extension of that work, bringing, as he put it, \u201ca sense of joyfulness and almost, like, taking ownership of the city, taking up space.\u201d He added, \u201cWe\u2019re creating something that\u2019s beautiful, which feels political to me.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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McGinley grew up in a middle-class Irish Catholic family in northern New Jersey, as the youngest of eight children. During his childhood, he spent \u201cevery day in the woods, in the dirt,\u201d with his brothers and sisters, and those memories of goofing off in nature provided a blueprint of sorts for his later work. \u201cIf you are on my photo shoots, I\u2019m really re-creating my childhood,\u201d he told me. But the joy in his images was hard-won, born out of family tragedy. McGinley\u2019s older brother, Michael, was an artist and an out gay man who lived in New York, and the first person to turn McGinley on to artists such as Keith Haring and Andy Warhol. But when McGinley was a teen-ager, Michael became sick with AIDS<\/em> and moved home to New Jersey. McGinley and his mother cared for Michael during what McGinley recalls as a \u201creally, really slow, painful death\u201d that included several attempts to end his life. He died in 1995, at the age of thirty-four. McGinley told me, \u201cI think about it every day\u2014when I wake up, during the middle of the day, at the end of the day. I think of my brother all the time.\u201d As a result, he said, \u201cI want to photograph what it\u2019s like to be alive, and to be in the moment, and to not take life for granted.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more Misophonia Fireworks<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Most of the works in \u201cNight Shift\u201d strike a celebratory tone similar to that of his road-trip project, and they can sometimes push to the brink of cheesiness, or perhaps na\u00efvet\u00e9, given the distinctly uncarefree times in which we\u2019re living. A pair of models jaunting across the Williamsburg Bridge with their arms slung across each other\u2019s shoulders has the giddy fizz of an advertisement. A shot of two streakers at the base of the Unisphere at the former World\u2019s Fair grounds, in Queens, one caught mid-twirl holding a clear plastic umbrella, reads like a risqu\u00e9 remake of \u201cSingin\u2019 in the Rain.\u201d (Shockingly, McGinley told me that he encountered the police only once, while shooting a car wash near the West Side Highway. They got on their loudspeaker and yelled, \u201cYou call this art?\u201d) But the strongest pictures in the series allow sombre notes to sneak in. In one scene, a pair of revellers dance naked just outside the fence of the Calvary Cemetery, thumbing their noses at the reaper while the Manhattan skyline towers in the distance. In another, three figures are arranged in a stunning tableau in the bowl of Central Park\u2019s Bethesda Fountain, which serves as the setting for the final scene in Tony Kushner\u2019s seminal AIDS<\/em>-era play, \u201cAngels in America.\u201d I asked McGinley if this nod was intentional, and he told me that it was. But there was more to it than that. \u201cI think about my brother as an angel a lot,\u201d he said. \u201cHe\u2019s protecting me.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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McGinley started this new project a little more than a year ago, as the cherry trees bloomed. The very first picture he took shows a glowing, ghostly man skipping down a sidewalk beneath a spray of blossoms. The morning of \u201cNight Shift\u201d\u00a0\u2019s opening, McGinley was looking for an old picture of his brother, to set as his iPhone background, and discovered one of Michael sitting under a cherry tree, covered in pink flowers. \u201cSort of like a good omen,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Read more The Met\u2019s \u201cCostume Art\u201d Makes a Case for Fashion<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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In \u201cNight Shift,\u201d McGinley\u2019s first New York show in eight years, the photographer brings his travelling bacchanal home to the city\u2019s streets, Chris Wiley writes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":809,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-810","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-photo-booth"],"yoast_head":"\nRyan McGinley Tries to Photograph What It Means to Be Alive - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=810\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Ryan McGinley Tries to Photograph What It Means to Be Alive - 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