Look inside
Night Shift is Ryan McGinley’s landmark project and publication produced in conjunction with his solo exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in New York City (on view June 13–August 8, 2026). The project marks a major shift in McGinley’s practicehis first full return to shooting in New York City after spending over a decade making his acclaimed cross-country road trip and landscape series.
McGinley describes Night Shift as his "poem to New York City." Reversing the traditional 9-to-5 workday, McGinley and his subjects worked overnight shifts from 9:00 PM to 5:00 AM, shooting over 60 nights across the span of a year (Spring 2025 through Winter 2025). The series covers all five boroughs: Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island, treating the city less as a static backdrop and more as an active, nocturnal playground.
The work bridges the raw, point-and-shoot street spontaneity of his early career (such as his seminal IRAK graffiti-crew photos) with the lyrical, choreographed nude studies of his American landscape road trips. The photographs feature McGinley’s friends, models, and fellow downtown creative community members traversing, scaling, and interacting with the urban environment at night.
Shot primarily on long lenses with radio-controlled off-camera flashes and slow shutter speeds. McGinley often directed his subjects via phone or walkie-talkie from a block or two away. The series utilizes the city’s natural nocturnal illuminationsneon signage, halogen streetlights, brake lights, and ambient glows—to create a vibrating, hallucinatory palette. McGinley actively sought out gritty, authentic New York textures rather than typical tourist postcards: steaming manholes, fire hydrants open in the summer heat, sanitation trucks, waterfront piers, train yards in Long Island City, and the vast span of Calvary Cemetery in Queens. When landmark architecture appears (like the Empire State Building or One World Trade Center), it is kept small in the background, subordinated to the raw energy of the foreground scene.
Published to accompany the gallery presentation, the Night Shift c captures the full 5-borough sequence in book form. Published in 2026 as a softcover monograph (with signed gallery editions), it functions as a comprehensive, rhythmic document of the seriestranslating the scale, grit, and nocturnal magic of the exhibition into a physical object.
Night Shift is Ryan McGinley’s landmark project and publication produced in conjunction with his solo exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in New York City (on view June 13–August 8, 2026). The project marks a major shift in McGinley’s practicehis first full return to shooting in New York City after spending over a decade making his acclaimed cross-country road trip and landscape series.
McGinley describes Night Shift as his "poem to New York City." Reversing the traditional 9-to-5 workday, McGinley and his subjects worked overnight shifts from 9:00 PM to 5:00 AM, shooting over 60 nights across the span of a year (Spring 2025 through Winter 2025). The series covers all five boroughs: Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island, treating the city less as a static backdrop and more as an active, nocturnal playground.
The work bridges the raw, point-and-shoot street spontaneity of his early career (such as his seminal IRAK graffiti-crew photos) with the lyrical, choreographed nude studies of his American landscape road trips. The photographs feature McGinley’s friends, models, and fellow downtown creative community members traversing, scaling, and interacting with the urban environment at night.
Shot primarily on long lenses with radio-controlled off-camera flashes and slow shutter speeds. McGinley often directed his subjects via phone or walkie-talkie from a block or two away. The series utilizes the city’s natural nocturnal illuminationsneon signage, halogen streetlights, brake lights, and ambient glows—to create a vibrating, hallucinatory palette. McGinley actively sought out gritty, authentic New York textures rather than typical tourist postcards: steaming manholes, fire hydrants open in the summer heat, sanitation trucks, waterfront piers, train yards in Long Island City, and the vast span of Calvary Cemetery in Queens. When landmark architecture appears (like the Empire State Building or One World Trade Center), it is kept small in the background, subordinated to the raw energy of the foreground scene.
Published to accompany the gallery presentation, the Night Shift c captures the full 5-borough sequence in book form. Published in 2026 as a softcover monograph (with signed gallery editions), it functions as a comprehensive, rhythmic document of the seriestranslating the scale, grit, and nocturnal magic of the exhibition into a physical object.