Photo by Dru Donovan.
Ryan McGinley's opening for Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere was last week. Crowds overflowed into the street and the fire department shut down the gallery. Many of the photos on display are available online at low resolutions, and if you want to see the work in person, go another day. Openings are for schmoozing and the mild party and celebrity of it, which is a perfectly valid reason to take Ryan McGinley seriously, but it is no indication of the quality of the work.
This collection represents a first incursion into formalism by McGinley. He stripped out the firework displays and outdoor nudity and film-based photographic effects, spent three hours with each of his wide range of models, and photographed them digitally in a controlled studio setting over the course of two years. They still look like Ryan McGinley photographs because they are Ryan Mcginley models. They are young, thin, lithe, and his photographic focus is to emphasize their unusual features: "Ashley" has a diastema to put Madonna to shame; "Sam" has a small mouth with full lips, set together eyes and a nose that juts out like his cheekbones; he reminds me of Nicholas Hoult or Andy Samberg. It's easy to find analogies in public figures; the features of the models are easier to identify than the people that compose them. This includes their nudity, which doesn't have the lifestyle or fantasy implications of his earlier work. "River" has a girthy uncut cock that would seem to be his only wide-set feature. "Matthew" looks at the camera with comfortable eyes and shows a scattering of hair under his arm, but it stops short of being an eroticized pose. They are well selected images and a good study for McGinley. The only thing I question are the titles. The scale of the project prohibits the former intimacy between the photographer and model that were important to his earlier sets. These are not his buddies or lovers, these are models scouted by someone on payroll. McGinley is a producer now. That's great, but it needs to be held in context and first names are a bit misleading.
I posted this photo by Dru Donovan as contrast. I overheard a few times the word "queer" in reference to McGinley's work. If that was the case, the title would be Everybody Knows This Is Somewhere. It isn't. That isn't his direction.
