Interview

PHOTOS BY JACK SIEGEL

Ryan McGinley works in a monograph-packed, L-shaped studio on the Lower East Side. As is well documented, he used to share the space with artist Dan Colen, but he now reserves the second room for the tacked-up black-and-white photographs that make up his latest series, "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere," which opens March 18 at Team Gallery in Soho.

One rarely thinks of a studio when picturing McGinley at work. It's easier to picture him on rooftops or New York streets, as was the set of his early work, or amidst the country roads, forests, and caves of his later, lysergic-colored productions. But his latest venture consists of 100 portraits of young men and women ranging in age from 18 to 29, completely nude and not swallowed up by their environments—as is typical of a McGinley photograph—but starkly defined against a white backdrop. It's a rather sweeping survey of color, sex, and sexuality, and of lean, ripening bodies, many of them decorated with homemade tattoos or scars.

With so many youths in the fold, it's no surprise that the subjects actually hail from all over the world—or at least those parts that have rock festivals, which is where they were picked by one of Ryan's assistants who spends her time attending global concerts on the lookout for someone he might want to capture. Each youth was then shot in the small second room of the Canal Street studio, still very animated even with the unremitting intimacy of the post-adolescent nudity on display. To get that kind of movement, Ryan relied on a "hype girl" who talked to the subject, asking him or her to sing a favorite song, jump on a mini-trampoline, or try acting exercises while he shot them on his digital camera. That kind of engagement is important to the artist. "I can work with shyness," he says, "but for the most part I want people to feel comfortable with me. It's really more about the photographer feeing comfortable right when they walk in that makes the subject feel comfortable."

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It's hardly etymologically surprising that the word "privy" refers to both a secret and a toilet. Beyond its obvious scatological associations, the bathroom is the one domestic refuge that remains invisible. Nevertheless, the bathroom is all about vision, mostly of oneself in the mirror. It's a place of control; it's where you prepare yourself each morning to face the world. But it is also a room fraught with confrontation, where you strip down and surrender to your own bodily remainder. It is certainly not the idyllic backdropfor a portrait. Which, of course, is why 34-year-old photographer Thomas Dozol seized upon the bathroom as the site of his recent series, Entre Temps.

"It started because I was looking to do a portrait series but I could find one that felt honest because people are too self-aware now," Dozol explains, citing the ubiquity of small-format digital cameras and event photography. "They are too much in control when they are getting their portraits taken. Then I looked at my own face in the mirror. I hate when I get flushed after I drink red wine or take a hot shower. I realized the thing I didn't like about it was that I was no longer in control."

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Tom Weschler; Bob Seger at Crosley Field (Cincinnati), June 27, 1970

Smell is commonly recognized as the strongest sensory gatekeeper to memory. For me, it has always been music. A certain refrain from a certain '80s song heard from a passing car window works on me like a kidnapper's van–or, really, like a teleportation device–sending me to some tragically too-real Cincinnati, Ohio, scenario of my youth. Some of my early musical obsessions have proved enduring; in retrospect, others are so confounding as to seem to belong to somebody else. For every prescient discovery of a band like the Violent Femmes, there is the confession that during one particularly dark summer it was the soundtrack to the movie Beaches mixed with the original prduction of Jesus Christ Superstar that resonated most with my life.

One particular singer who entered my life early and has since remained is Bob Seger. My father listened to Bob Seger. He owned a floor-installation company, one so small that he himself installed the flooring. And the guys who worked for my father listened to Bob Seger.

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