Ryan McGinley Tries to Photograph What It Means to Be Alive

A few years later, McGinley’s work took an Edenic turn. He and his friends would pile into vans and light out for the territory in the grand tradition of American road-tripping. McGinley photographed models cavorting naked (always naked) through sand dunes in the Mojave Desert and pine forests in Vermont, in a frigid ice cave in upstate New York and perched above a rushing waterfall in Tennessee. Fireworks—plumes of smoke and pinwheeling streaks of sparks—were often deployed to amp up the atmospherics, lending his scenes the feel of a barn-burning bacchanal. In McGinley’s world, it seemed, the good times were always rolling, like some impossible perpetual-motion machine lubricated with youth, beauty, and sex, only now the device had been set to “escapism mode.”

McGinley’s newest body of work, “Night Shift,” which is currently on view at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in Soho, marks a kind of homecoming, in more ways than one. The exhibition is his first in New York in eight years, and the first project in decades to find him prowling the city in the wee hours, as he did in his not-so-misspent youth. (The title cheekily refers to the fact that all of the pictures were taken between nine at night and five in the morning, the party animal’s nine-to-five.) Shot with jittery long exposures, aided by strobes and a small crew of assistants, McGinley’s photos show subjects roaming through the sleeping city, hanging from the underside of a bridge or the back of a garbage truck, frolicking in the spray from an open fire hydrant, or wandering down a tangle of train tracks in a Long Island City rail yard. McGinley told me recently, during a conversation at Jeffrey Deitch, that a good portion of his attention in recent years has been taken up by L.G.B.T.Q. activism—mostly attending marches and immortalizing them on film. He sees the new series, which features mostly queer models, as an extension of that work, bringing, as he put it, “a sense of joyfulness and almost, like, taking ownership of the city, taking up space.” He added, “We’re creating something that’s beautiful, which feels political to me.”