The Arresting World

By: Interview by Jamie Brisick | Ryan McGinley | February 10, 2010 | Profile

Ryan McGinley’s list of achievements is massive. In 2003, fresh out of Parsons School of Design, he was the youngest artist to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art. That same year he was named Photographer of the Year by American Photo Magazine. In ’07 he was awarded the Young Photographer Infinity Award by the International Center of Photography. Now 32, his works are in some of the most prestigious museums and galleries throughout the world, including the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Saatchi Collection in London and the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

But these are only the tangible honors. What he has done with mid-20s, presumably ecstasy-fuelled kids running naked in the woods not only commingles childhood wonder, seething sexual tension and On The Road-esque wild freedom, but it makes you want to disrobe for any number of reasons. His dreamy, ethereal images of Kate Moss reveal not the cigarette-puffing bad girl but rather a vulnerable, Edenic nubile rarely seen in the fashion world. And the fact that he would chase Morrissey shows around from ’04 to ’06, and train his camera not on the stage but rather the fans, speaks volumes.

The following conversation took place via e-mail.

How/when/where did you get started?
I was always interested in art ever since I can remember. When I was a little kid, I won a contest for drawing Smokey the Bear for a local supermarket ad, and I got a $300 prize. I had books that taught you how to draw monsters line by line, and I used to love those. In high school, I got into Warhol. I bought some generic art book about him at a flea market with my mom, and that was the first art book I ever got.

In high school, I took lots of extracurricular art classes, but I did everything except for photography — silk-screening, life drawing, still lifes, ceramics, jewelry making. ... It was only in college at Parsons that I started taking photos. I was majoring in graphic design, which I only did as a compromise with my parents because they would only let me go to art school if I did something that had to do with computers. In a lot of my classes I had to do architectural renderings of the insides of ornate churches, and it was such a pain in the ass that I bought a disposable camera in a drugstore and took a picture of the church and then projected it onto a wall and traced it. Then I just started taking pictures of my friends for fun. I was living in a flophouse on Bleecker Street, and all my friends would always be over just hanging out and doing drugs. I started taking pictures of them, and I don’t know, it became like an addiction. I was so obsessed with it, and I started using the photos for my school assignments. I was familiar with desktop publishing from all my graphic design classes, and I had a printer, and I bought a negative scanner when they first came out, so it made printing out pictures I liked so easy; it was like a little darkroom on my desk. And I started making little zines for my friends. Some friends of mine in the photo department liked them and were like, “Whoa, these are good, you should show these.” And then my friend Jack Walls knew a gallery space that was being torn down, and he said, “You should have a show there before it’s gone,” and I did.

I snuck into the darkroom at Parsons and started printing everything, and I got so into it. I didn’t really know what I was doing, so all the prints were weirdly tinted and off, but it was so much fun. So I had the show, and I made 100 handmade books of the photos that were in the show, and I sent them out to artists and magazines that I thought were cool, and that was it. It was a whirlwind. And within a few months, I was being flown around to show in art galleries and do stuff for magazines. It was crazy. So, phew! There you go, that’s the extremely abridged story of my start.

Early heroes/inspirations?
It’s hard to distinguish between early and now because great art inspires you forever. I guess skateboard videos are definitely an early inspiration, like Alien Workshop’s Memory Screen or Foundation’s Barbarians at the Gate or any Powell Peralta video. I watched tons of skate videos growing up. Other things I’m inspired by off the top of my head are Omar from The Wire, children’s books, Tom Sawyer, Apocalypse Now, nudist photographs, YouTube videos, Will McBride, Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven. Jim Henson’s Time Piece, Lethal Weapon, Indiana Jones, Die Hard, The Goonies, Over the Edge. Alice Neel, Sally Mann, Woody Allen ... I take inspiration from all these things.

What kind of childhood did you have?
I always say that I was raised by wolves. I have seven older brothers and sisters, so by the time I was born, my parents were like, whatever. So my teenage siblings basically raised me, and there were no rules. I was very free. When I was like 9 or 10, me and my friends used to hang out at this place called “the hellhole.” It was an open manhole that you climbed down into, and teenagers had spray-painted satanic things all over the walls. That’s where I smoked my first cigarettes and drank my first beers. We would sit on the sidewalk in front of the liquor store and ask people to buy us beer — it was called “shoulder-tapping.” I spent a lot of time sitting on curbs and setting off fireworks and blowing shit up in the woods. The best thing to blow up was Aqua Net hairspray bottles; they would make mushroom, atom-bomb-style explosions. Those were my preteen years. It’s funny because I guess I’m still interested in the same stuff — explosions and altered states and energy. I’m basically the same as I was when I was 9.

What kinds of things were on your bedroom walls?
I had a gigantic poster of Perry Farrell lying in a bed that I put over my own bed. Also a poster from the Jane’s Addiction album Nothing’s Shocking. You know, the one with the two nude girls with their hair on fire in the rocking chair. I had the CK1 ads torn out of a magazine with Kate Moss topless — it was the first time that a woman appeared topless in a mainstream ad, I think. I just thought it was cool. I had lots of skateboard ads; stuff ripped out of Big Brother and Thrasher, like all the Powell Peralta graphics; a big Morrissey poster from the “We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful” single with the teddy bear Band-Aid on his head. I still have that one. And I used to draw and paint, so I had a lot of my own stuff up, like nude studies from life-drawing classes. My walls were completely covered because my room had the ugliest wallpaper — it was all Civil War illustrations of, like, soldiers with canons. My parents were obsessed with colonial Williamsburg. They would take me there for vacations; it was so terrible.

What was your first breakthrough moment? At what point did you know you were on to big things?
The Index book. That was the breakthrough for me. Once Index magazine published that book of mine in 2001, everything changed. Everyone wanted me to do stuff for them. I started to get paid and sell artwork. It was like an explosion, and I got to travel all over the world, and it all happened so fast. I had to figure out how to handle it all, how to be an artist, really quickly. It was exciting. And then the Whitney show in 2003, which happened because the Index book ended up on the desk of a curator at the Whitney, and that sort of legitimized me as an artist. So those were my two breakthrough moments.

What has been the highlight of your career?
Just getting to travel so much, I think. A lot of people in my family have never been out of the U.S. and have never seen the world. The best part of my job is that I get to go to the strangest places all over the United States and the world. I always say that having a camera is like having a box of magic because it gains you access to people and places you might not otherwise see. Also having a camera lets me see people nude, which is so cool because how could you ever do that without having a camera, you know?

Lowlight?
Well, there’s a pretty big dichotomy in my process because while I’m shooting I’m surrounded by so many people, and I’m traveling and running around and being very active, and then suddenly it’s over, and there I am on my couch, alone, with thousands and thousands of photos to go through and edit, and it’s a process that I can only do by myself without any distractions. I wouldn’t call it a lowlight, but it’s just hard to make that transition. It’s jarring.

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