A great photo will make you stop, you’ll pause to discover words again, and most magically it will take you away just for that instance, whether it be someplace you desire to be within, or somewhere unknown and strange. It’s like that wonderful stirring inside of you, each time you listen to your favourite line in a song, or hear the voice of a singer able to bring shivers to your spine. It’s a really great tingle.
I’d quite like to get lost in Ryan Mcginley’s world- if only for a while! A world of carefree naked people (maybe I could get lost in it clothed…)faces stare back full of freedom and rebellion, of hidden stories, and ideas yet to be unravelled. There is also something 
quite daunting in the midst too. Maybe merely on a personal level being on the other side of the frame-you will wonder if you might find for yourself all that you spy through these windows, with all the contradictions that reality encompasses.
Mr McGinleys Dakota Hair-2004 (below) was the first of his works that I encountered. A barren, sandy landscape rushes by escaping the photo, and then this solitary nude figure drinking from a styrofoam cup on the back of a truck. It doesn’t seem all that extraordinary, but then the things that take our breath away the most are almost always very ordinary.
“My photographs are a celebration of life, fun and the beautiful…They are a world that doesn’t exist. A fantasy. Freedom is real. There are no rules. The life I wish I was living.”
His work is often said to be “voyeuristic”, but I feel as though it’s more like a great fervour for life, as if he is able to capture for us these small moments we thought we may have glimpsed; snapshots we just missed. He translates feelings, and memories and suspends them in his imagery. The sense of movement and suspension in time works to put this to great effect. Mr McGinley’s photos seem incredibly organic, but there is a certain amount of crafting involved in each scenario (come on, you don’t get beautiful naked people prancing around everywhere now do you), as he says himself, they are a fantasy, a similar but different echo of our own world.
“I got to the point where I couldn’t wait for the pictures to happen anymore…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.”
Since the summer of 2005 Mr McGinley has taken an annual road trip with his troup of assistants and beautiful guys and girls (according to a source, one assistant has the task of a carrying around a boom box to ensure that there is a soundtrack for Mr McGinley’s creativity, which is if I may say so.. UBER awesome). He gets them to interact with each other, getting them distracted with smoke and fireworks, and all matter of things so the models become very natural under the gaze of Mr McGinley’s camera. In this way he ’creates’ his photos, but it’s still not something you could simply replicate by taking a couple of naked people into the desert and taking a few shots. Without the knowledge of how these models will interact, how to capture all those senses being revealed, the photos would just be lifeless and dead which is simply not the case with Mr McGinley, showing the great grasp over the work he creates.
Ryan McGinley is a great big gust of creative fresh air. His fearlessness, spirit, and creative freedom something I aspire and envy. I love this inspiring quote from him…
”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.”
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great images
Comment by severnyproductions August 7, 2009 @ 2:26 am