Many followers of fine-art photography world know that Ryan McGinley’s work has been received with mixed emotions.

What those politics might be, exactly, is hard to say, though the question arises in light of the apparently carefree spirit of Mr. McGinley’s pictures. The artist seems to understand this: his inclusion of a shot of a friend, speeding away from ground zero on a bike, his mouth covered by his shirt, carries a jolt of reality-check surprise. However the work develops, it is refreshing to encounter, as we seem to, artists operating to some extent outside the mainstream of the art world itself, where volatile energies — aesthetic and political — are too often stroked into craftsy, resistance-free acceptability.

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You don’t need specific equipment to ape the look of McGinley or Larry Clark or Wolfgang Tillmans or Nan Goldin or Corinne Day or Leeta Harding. It’s just the commercial version of the prevailing snapshot aesthetic — off-kilter angles, high contrast images, on-camera flash, murky available light.

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That being said, his recent video for the New York Times Magazine is without question simply beautiful.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 20th, 2008 at 8:09 am and is filed under By David, Photographers, Posts with video, Quotes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.