Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere represents a significant stylistic shift for American photographer Ryan McGinley. Released in conjunction with an exhibition at Team Gallery in New York, the monograph features a conversation between McGinley and fellow photographer Catherine Opie.
Prior to this body of work, McGinley was heavily known for capturing vibrant, color-drenched, and chaotic scenes of youthful adventure across boundless American landscapes. For Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, he dispensed entirely with the outdoors and color photography. Instead, he brought his subjects into the austere, controlled environment of his New York studio to create a restrained, open-ended series of black-and-white nude portraits.
Over the course of two years, McGinley invited around 150 hand-picked subjects, many spotted at concerts and festivals, into his studio. Stripped bare of clothing and external context, the models are suspended in what the artist refers to as a "strategic nowhere," shifting the viewer's entire focus onto the subjects' emotional states, vulnerability, and inherent optimism. The result is a deeply intimate catalog of youth and identity, characterized by a meticulous studio practice where thousands of frames were shot to distill a single and defining portrait of each person.
Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere represents a significant stylistic shift for American photographer Ryan McGinley. Released in conjunction with an exhibition at Team Gallery in New York, the monograph features a conversation between McGinley and fellow photographer Catherine Opie.
Prior to this body of work, McGinley was heavily known for capturing vibrant, color-drenched, and chaotic scenes of youthful adventure across boundless American landscapes. For Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, he dispensed entirely with the outdoors and color photography. Instead, he brought his subjects into the austere, controlled environment of his New York studio to create a restrained, open-ended series of black-and-white nude portraits.
Over the course of two years, McGinley invited around 150 hand-picked subjects, many spotted at concerts and festivals, into his studio. Stripped bare of clothing and external context, the models are suspended in what the artist refers to as a "strategic nowhere," shifting the viewer's entire focus onto the subjects' emotional states, vulnerability, and inherent optimism. The result is a deeply intimate catalog of youth and identity, characterized by a meticulous studio practice where thousands of frames were shot to distill a single and defining portrait of each person.