Blithe spirit ... Lizzy, 2002, by Ryan McGinley. Photograph: © Ryan McGinley
MySpace, Facebook, Friendster and the galaxies of knock-off sites are among the most popular sites on the web. There, kids can jump-start their social standing and pump up fragile self-images by posting pictures of themselves and their friends being young, dumb and as carefree as they wish reality would allow. But no matter how many snapshots teenagers and post-teens upload to their profile, they all merely aspire to the perfect, youthful glory captured by the blissfully beautiful photographs of Ryan McGinley.
An array of McGinley's mythic, magnificent portraits can be seen on his website. In sharp, simple design, the site has the look of an intimate scrapbook in which nothing flashy distracts from the overwhelming beauty of McGinley's work.
As a New Jersey-born, 22-year-old graphic design major at New York's Parsons School of Visual Arts in 1999, McGinley started photographing professionally at a time when fashion photography was rejecting its infatuation with grit. The decaying beauty typified by moody images of slouchy, stoned, skinny girls by artists David Sims, Glen Luchford, Mario Sorrenti and Corinne Day was being erased from magazine pages in favour of buoyant stylised shots of pretty Brazilian girls with vibrant, party-ready bodies and supernaturally white teeth.
As a bridge from one sensibility to the other, McGinley's early photographs of kids messing around, stealing stuff and getting trashed were influenced by graffiti, queer culture, skateboarding and sloppy parties - but without the hard drugs, looming tragedy and romanticised madness of his predecessors' self-defining photography.
McGinley's images celebrating roughness and realism in art and fashion photography have been widely exhibited internationally. In 2002 he became the youngest artist to ever have a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and last year he was awarded the ICP Infinity Award: Young Photographer.
Recently, McGinley has started taking groups of friends on photographic excursions. Acting as team leader and shoot director, McGinley finds inspiration for these outings in his archives of amateur photographs, documentary images, contemporary photography, National Geographic, and naturalist and porn magazines from the 60s and 70s. From the thousands of images that emerge, he selects only a few to exhibit. The brief video seen on his website of a boy and a girl riding their bicycles in nature is a small, sweet, scene from one of these trips.
Like Kate Moss, who modelled for McGinley for W magazine, McGinley's images exemplify timeless, golden kid, hedonistic happiness. And like his work, McGinley's website perfectly frames, distills and projects these dreamy, profoundly poetic images.
