 | They get high, get naked, and jump on trampolines. They skinny-dip in mountain lakes and stare searchingly at themselves in bathroom mirrors. They giggle and hug. They shoplift and puke and crash together on dingy mattresses on the floor. They are the cool, giddy, beautiful young things who populate the pictorial world of photographer Ryan McGinley. Since his solo debut at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2003, McGinley has become the leading purveyor of images of youthful debauchery in a semiconfessional mode. Like his predecessors, Larry Clark, Nan Goldin, and Wolfgang Tillmans, McGinley works in what's known as the "lifestyle genre" of contemporary photography. His pictures of his friends, lovers, and fellow artists are intimate and exuberant, offering a vision of hedonistic rebellion and playful, polymorphous sexuality. His twentysomething models appear both childlike and dissolute, as in this shot of a pixieish young woman gleefully suspended in midair before a kid's bedroom wall scribbled with graffiti. |  |
Ryan McGinley, Lizzy, 2002. Copyright Ryan McGinley. Courtesy Team Gallery, New York. |
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