Ryan McGinley | Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere

Ryan McGinley

Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere

New York City, USA: Dashwood Books, 2010

180 pp., 22 x 28 cm., softcover

Edition of 2000

Taking it’s title from a 1969 Neil Young LP, this catalogue for an exhibition of the same name features all one hundred images from the show, as well as a conversation between between Ryan McGinley and Catherine Opie.

"While putting together the catalog that accompanies his current show at Team Gallery, Ryan McGinley asked another photographer, Catherine Opie, if she would interview him. In some ways it was a strange choice. Ms. Opie, 49, is best known for studio portraits that are as static and deliberate as the 32-year-old Mr. McGinley’s photographs are hyperkinetic. And while both artists explore queer identity, they’re separated by gender, geography and nearly a generation.

Their conversation, as recorded in the catalog, is probing and insightful. [...] At the heart of this exchange are ideas about studio portraiture, and about the photographers who defined this art form in the 20th century: Penn, Avedon and especially Mapplethorpe. Also evident is a renewed interest in community and family.

Both artists also happen to be going through transitional phases. Ms. Opie, working in Los Angeles, had a midcareer survey at the Guggenheim in 2008, and Mr. McGinley, in New York and settling into his 30s, is trying to move beyond the kids-behaving-badly imagery of his 2003 New York solo debut at the Whitney, a first impression that still defines him, at least commercially.

[...]

Studio photography, for Mr. McGinley, seems to be synonymous with control. Physically, the lithe young models who appear in the pictures at Team Gallery don’t look all that different from other McGinley subjects. Yet in black and white, and with the isolation of the studio, they’re suddenly awkward and even indecent.

[You] have to admire Mr. McGinley for making such a decisive break with the work that has earned him critical accolades, a hipster following and a substantial commercial portfolio. His choice of Ms. Opie for the catalog is part of the shift. In a way he’s disowning earlier role models: “I feel like if I get compared to Nan Goldin and Larry Clark again, I’m going to buy a gun and start shooting people,” he jokes in the catalog interview.

As interviewer, Ms. Opie poses some good questions. Why take the exhibitionism indoors, for instance? “In a place like a studio, where the person is already stripped from all context,” she asks, “what is your interest in the body and in representing it?”

She’s also probably one of the only people whose first reaction to Mr. McGinley’s photography is to historicize it. His shots of teenagers exploring the wilderness are “steeped in a nostalgia for freedom that dates back to the 19th century,” Ms. Opie says. “Like, I look at your work sometimes and I think about F. Holland Day.” Her observations are borne out in several large color photographs at Team, set on cliffs and in caves, that serve as a foil to the black and whites.

Ms. Opie also draws out Mr. McGinley’s interest in family, which she shares. Mr. McGinley is the youngest of eight children, and his siblings are all more than a decade older than he. Everyone in his pictures, he says, “resembles the way that my brothers and sisters looked when I was a child.”

In a way, his relationship to Ms. Opie has the same dynamic. She’s the cautious older sister, and he’s the adventurous little brother. But as their shows imply, those roles can sometimes be reversed.”

- Karen Rosenberg, New York Times