WE LOVE RYAN MCGINLEY --MARRY US SWEETIE!!
Vitals
Date of Birth
10/17/1977 (30 years old)
Undergrad
Parsons
Neighborhood
Chinatown
Website
www.ryanmcginley.com
Who
McGinley is a photographer who takes snaps of young hipsters having sex and doing drugs, and makes uptown collectors feel with it.
Backstory
McGinley grew up in a working class family in suburban New Jersey (he's the youngest of eight kids) and spent his teenage years as a skate punk in Washington Square Park. In the early 1990s, he was photographed by director Larry Clark, who was looking for amateur actors to cast in Kids. Clark ended up choosing McGinley's pal Leo Fitzpatrick, but the photographer's grittily hypersexual pictures of wayward teens proved a major influence when McGinley picked up a camera himself and started documenting, vérité style, the hedonism of his pretty young friends—such as future reprobate art star Dash Snow, whom McGinley met when Snow was living in Alphabet City as a 16-year-old member of the Irak graffiti crew. (A shot that McGinley took of Snow tagging the side of a high rise would later become one of his most famous images.)
In 1999, as a 21-year-old Parsons student, McGinley sent out his homemade photography book The Kids are Alright—featuring his Lower East Side posse doing drugs, throwing up, tagging buildings, shoplifting, and having sex—to 100 magazine editors and artists. Index immediately dispatched him to Berlin to photograph the musician Momus (McGinley got Momus and his girlfriend to get naked for the camera). Commissions from Vice inevitably followed, and in 2002, at 24, McGinley became the youngest person ever to have a solo show at the Whitney. A year later, his photos were exhibited at P.S. 1. McGinley has since worked for a handful of other magazines as well as for advertisers like Nike, Puma, and Verizon. He's represented by AFG Management.
Of note
While McGinley's shtick, like Nan Goldin's before him, is that his faux-spontaneous photos provide an unmediated glimpse into a downtown bohemia edgier than anything you've experienced first-hand, there's never been anything spontaneous about his success, which he's pursued with relentless and calculating ambition (indeed, his knack for schmoozing and self-promotion might be all that truly distinguishes him from the YouTube/MySpace multitudes offering up exhibitionistic visual diaries of their rebellious lives). And although he continues to strive for the free-and-easy authenticity that made his pictures famous, he's now investing a lot more money and effort into the process. For the past few summers he's been organizing road trips to California, taking two vans full of equipment, props, and eager nubile youngsters (who audition by stripping off at his studio) to be immortalized along the way in whichever posed scenarios McGinley is inspired to construct—at the cost of around $100,000. But he makes it back, and then some, especially now that he—along with the other overhyped artists in his clique, namely Dash Snow and Dan Colen—is becoming popular with collectors: A recent photo went for close to $25,000 at auction.
Personal
The gay McGinley and his longtime buddy Dan Colen live together in a Chinatown loft that's a former brothel. They used to share an East Village apartment, where they took a Polaroid of every person who visited them, eventually covering the walls. Although his photos are full of young hotties taking drugs through every orifice, McGinley swears his life is much tamer: "A lot of people look at my work and assume it is all just an autobiography and that my life is as wild and fun as the images I take. I like that assumption but it's not true."
source: city file
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