Ryan McGinley’s Retrospective Monograph

Following in the footsteps of Allen Ginsberg and his “Snapshot Poetics”, McGinley turned his lens on the bodies and pastimes of his Lower East Side milieu, adding another generation to the History of Photography. This work, from the first years of this century, has given way to Ryan’s subjects running through and falling out of otherworldly utopian landscapes, caverns, forests and deserts; worlds away from the Chinatown tenements he still calls home. – Jack Woody, Twin Palms Publisher Ryan McGinley (b. 1977) is a New York City based photographer. At 25, he was the youngest artist to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art. One of the hottest photographers of his generation right now, McGinley lives up to the buildup, making a splash with this energetic, timely, and personal collection of images in his first retrospective monograph, You and I published by Twin Palms. You and I pieces together a careful ten-year overview of McGinley’s work, resulting in a portrait of a generation. Taking us along on his youthful road trip across America, he incorporates the American landscape with nude figures of friends and acquaintances, perpetually falling from buildings, down waterfalls, out of trees, and over cliffs. McGinley said, “In the beginning, all the stuff was documentary, but after a while, I got bored with waiting for things to happen—for someone to light a Christmas tree on fire or take their clothes off and make love.” Twin Palms publisher, Jack Woody, has been working on this compilation since 2004. He told me earlier this year, while suppressing a laugh, “Some books just take longer than others.” After viewing the sequencing of the book many times, it continues to leave me with a feeling of freedom and buoyancy – well worth the wait. You and I is available December 15 with a must-read commentary by Vince Aletti and essay by Sylvia Wolf, both in English and French. Elizabeth Avedon