⁰¹ Ryan McGinley, Blue Moon, 2009, c-print, 76.2 × 114.3 cm (30 × 45 in). Courtesy The Breeder, Athens and Team Gallery, New York.
⁰² Ryan McGinley, Marlon and Rebecca, 2007–08, c-print, 40.6 × 61 cm (16 × 24 in). Courtesy The Breeder, Athens and Team Gallery, New York.
⁰³ Ryan McGinley, Grace (Teeth), 2009, c-print, 102 × 155 cm (40 × 61 in). Courtesy The Breeder, Athens and Team Gallery, New York.
⁰⁴ Ryan McGinley, Wes (Cotton Kingdom), 2009, c-print, 155 × 102 cm (61 × 40 in). Courtesy The Breeder, Athens and Team Gallery, New York.
⁰⁵ Ryan McGinley, Untitled (Jonas), 2009, black and white photograph, 45.7 × 34.3 cm (18 × 13.5 in). Courtesy The Breeder, Athens and Team Gallery, New York.
⁰⁶ Ryan McGinley, Untitled (Chelsea), 2009, black and white photograph, 45.7 × 34.3 cm (18 × 13.5 in). Courtesy The Breeder, Athens and Team Gallery, New York.

Faye Tzanetoulakou: Ryan, in your first show in Athens at the Breeder gallery, we came across snapshots of boys and girls in their prime caught red handed wandering with magnificent insouciance around the vast expanses of the States, in a celebration of pure vagabond nu-beat Americana. Thinking back to Kerouac, what is your contribution, in a contemporary context, to the popular theme of freewheeling in and out of geographical, social and personal boundaries?

Ryan McGinley: Well, I was definitely inspired by reading On the Road, and also by road-trip movies like Easy Rider, and by Robert Frank’s The Americans. I did a five-year journey of traveling all over the United States every summer and it was very much about the American landscape and also about a sense of freedom and adventure that perhaps is also very American. The models I choose tend to be modern-day bohemians and free spirits, which I guess adds to the ‘freewheeling’ theme, as you call it. I think the difference with my work, or my contribution to this theme, is that I acknowledge that it’s not real life. These are not documentary photos — it’s a total fantasy world that I’ve created.

FT: In your quest to portray an all-fantasy realm, all your landscape pictures seem to me like actions frozen in time. What could be a starting point for such photoshoots — a random instance or a specific truth that needs obssesively to be said? Do you aim to control the ephemeral without sacrificing the spontaneous? How significant is for you to capture the moment, no matter how elusive it might seem? In other words just how much of it is staging and how much a momentary draw of serendipity with a fair share of improvisation and a little bit of surprise add to it?

RMc: I shoot on a schedule and I have ideas for what I want to happen, but the best photos happen when everything goes wrong. I think a pretty easy way to sum up my work is that it’s about contingency. Which, to me, means that you plan everything — you cast the people, you pick the location, you come up with the idea — but you plan for everything to go wrong. So, I have everything in place, but I know that the image that I have in my head is not the one I’ll end up with. I aim for an element of surprise and accidents. It’s kind of like going backwards. Planning to be unplanned.

FT: So, you would not know beforehand how the picture will turn out to be at the end …

RMc: Well, like I said, you have to have ideas; you can’t just take random photographs. It’s the difference between a photographer or a photojournalist and an artist. You create your world through your camera and you have to know what kind of world you want to create. Ideas come from interests and interests come from obsessions. I’m a very obsessive person.

FT: The way you depict landscape has a timeless, space-less, open ended quality. By merging the young subjects within this framework, it carries an Eden-like pre-Fall resonance and brings in mind Marcel Proust saying that the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in heaving new eyes. Would you agree to it?

RMc: I don’t really go for religious imagery, but I do like for the photos to have a timeless quality. One of the best things about working with nudes is that without clothing there are very few traces of contemporary culture. The same goes for natural landscapes. I’m always trying to find landscapes and locations that look very nondescript so that there’s no way of knowing when the photo was taken. I loved shooting in the caves because I was able to make photos in this place that had been untouched for millions of years. I guess that means that I don’t really agree with Proust, because part of the fun of my job is in fact getting to seek out new landscapes. I get what he means though, it’s important for a photographer to always see things in a way that no one else does. So why not have both? New landscapes and new eyes. I prefer to quote Robert Bresson from Notes on Cinematography: ‘Be the first to see what you see as you see it.’

FT: In these crisp and unspoilt environs, the focus undouptedly falls on the nude youthful portraits, all strongly androgynous and unromanticised, masterly balancing between the banal and the sublime, in a contemporary reading of nymphs and fawns in a quirky private Arcadia. Is there a hint of ’60s nostalgia on the set, without the drugs, the ropey hygiene and the overall promiscuity that is?

RMc: Well, I wasn’t alive in the ’60s so I don’t think I can be nostalgic for it, but people have said that to me before — that there is a hippie-commune-like feel to the photos, so sure, why not. But I think that the ’60s aesthetic mostly comes through in the colours of the film, especially in the cave series. The caves are pitch black so you have to create light, and I wanted to make the colours of the light really psychedelic. I was inspired a lot by the album cover for Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy.

FT: The fact that you choose subjects who resemble friends from your teen years refers to a more personal artistic journey. How could this reach a wider audience that needs to associate with the narrative?

RMc: Actually, I often choose subjects who resemble my older brothers and sisters when they were teenagers. The five-year road trip project was in many ways about my family. I’m the youngest of eight kids in my family; my oldest brother is 18 years older than me and the brother closest in age to me is 11 years older than me. So when I was young I was raised by all these teenagers and I wanted to recreate these adventures that I had when I was a little boy with my brothers and sisters. But that was a five year project and now it’s over. For the black-and-white studio nudes, I definitely shot a wider array of subjects.

FT: These new series of B/W portraits we firstly came across at your show in Athens, resemble such an intense, doric, fully frontal and tangy fresh view of a generation, and at the same time hold a diachronic value as a candid icon of eternal youth with a passion for life and journeying. No existential angst seems to be involved, all catharsis and no hubris. It is also very important to point out that they express a renewed interest in the long forgotten bond between the artist and the model.

RMc: Thank you Faye for such kind and thoughtful words. I’m not sure what else I can add to that! I basically wanted to give myself a new challenge. My previous work had been so much about being outdoors in nature with large groups of people and having vivid colors and vast expanses, I thought what could be more opposite than a black-and-white studio portrait? I wanted to see how I could find my voice within such strict confines. The commonality with my previous work, as you mention, is the idea of youth. I’m still interested in photographing kids of mostly college age, because it is such an optimistic time, before you start to get jaded.

FT: In a quantative argument, how do you really limit yourself of all the things you’d ever like to photograph and you are obsessed with?

RMc: When I first starting taking pictures, I photographed literally everything. All the food I ate, all the places I went, all the people I saw, photos of homeless people in the park and doors with graffiti written all over them … I was so hungry for imagery; I was trying to figure out what I was interested in and I wanted to see how everything translated to a photograph. Eventually I realised that I was most interested in natural landscapes and people — really specific people, like artists and unique characters. So I think it’s just about figuring out what you’re into and narrowing it down to a few things that you can focus on and get really obsessed with.

FT: Going to the series now. The action here continues inside even more spectacular and unspoilt surroundings. The human figure functions as the perfect guide to such eerie underworld, being steeped in celestial rain, getting dematerialised through cosmic fog, or being devoured by a set of gigantic teeth built from stalagmites and stalactites. All the above consist an absolute primeval experience for the viewer, while the mood feels mute and introspected. Have you discovered a neverland within those edgy walls, possibly your own private Etant Donnes? How challenging is it to direct such apocalyptic imagery in terra incognita and capture it on film?

RMc: On my road trip in 2008, I fell in love with caves. It was such a crazy world, discovering these caves that haven’t been touched for millions of years, and they were so beautiful. But the whole process was extremely challenging and oftentimes it did feel apocalyptical. There is always a sense of impending doom in a cave, like a rock could easily fall and crush you at any moment. It was so different from the work I had done before. The road trip photos were all about running and jumping and falling and all these different explosive elements and actions and just shooting and shooting and shooting nonstop. The caves were the opposite of that. I had to slow everything down. The cameras were on tripods, and the models had to hold perfectly still for several minutes because they were long exposures. We worked on the lighting for each shot for a long time, testing out all the different colour combinations. It was like making an opera; it was so theatrical and so painstaking. It was like an endurance test. Carrying equipment three miles up the sides of mountains and then crawling into tiny tunnels in the ground on your hands and knees and then staying in there all day. And inside the caves it was freezing and the models are nude and they have to hold poses in dangerous places for two minutes, staying perfectly still. Morale would sometimes get very low. But as arduous as it all was, I’m glad I did it. I think it's important to challenge yourself. There are so many artists — especially photographers — that get stuck doing the same thing. I like to take risks and keep it fresh.

FT: It is indeed astounding that while the end result is so vibrant, almost painterly and the poses often look impossible, no picture has been technologically retouched upon. What secret techno concoction do you use?

RMc: Well, in terms of colour, the cave series was the most elaborate process. I wanted to create a colour palette that looked like Stephen Shore and William Eggleston photos in the 1960s and ’70s. Eggleston used a process called dye-transfer and it made colours look really saturated. You can’t use that method anymore because it’s toxic, but it was used a lot on advertising in the ’50s and ’60s to make products look hyperreal. Stephen Shore used a film stock by Kodak called Ektachrome. When you look at his early photos, like in his book American Surfaces, it also looks really saturated. They don’t make film like that anymore either. So I wanted to create a similar hyper-saturated colour palette and I experimented with creating it through light. I use Brinkman spotlights and coloured gels. There are two spotlights, one for the background and one for the foreground and we try out all the colours of the rainbow and then I choose which colours I like best. I choose colours based on how the walls of the cave absorb the colour. Afterward, I give it to my printer and he prints it in 30 different hues in the darkroom and then we put all of those up on the wall and I choose the final colour of the image. Sometimes it remains the same, and sometimes I’ll pick something completely different. But there’s no digital retouching.

FT: Although Morrissey, your beloved songwriter, as if inspired by your sitters, sings “don’t need more ammunition, I’ve got no space and no time in my life”, what consists your ammunition nowadays that gives your art its cutting-edge?

RMc: I have an obsessive nature; if I’m into something I get really into it. And I think that’s what it takes to be a good artist. You have to be obsessed with really specific things and that has to be a common theme in your work. You have to do a thorough investigation of a theme, and then you start to find original ideas. You have to take risks and not worry about it not being successful. Like my cave series, I had no idea whether that was going to work out or not. The whole thing was a risk. It took me two years to make that body of work by experimenting for an entire year before I got the process down. Not to mention risking our lives by going in to these dangerous caves all the time. Or the new black-and-white series — I took all the elements that I was used to working with, the colours, the action — and threw it all out the window. Basically, my ammunition is being an endlessly obsessive collector of images.

FT: Ansel Adams, whose sublime landscapes are currently on show in Athens, once said ‘I know I shall be castigated by a large group of people today, but I was trained to assume that art related to the elusive quality of beauty and that the purpose of art was concerned with the elevation of the spirit.’ Given contemporary photography's tendency towards raw realism (Wolfgang Tillmans, Juergen Teller), how interested are you in conveying the psychological experience of natural beauty?

RMc: Very interested.


Ryan McGinley’s Crooked-Aisles exhibition was presented at the Breeder gallery in Athens, from 14 January to 27 February 2010.