Ryan McGinley was born on October 17, 1977, in Ramsey, New Jersey. He received a BFA in graphic design at Parsons School of Design, New York, in 2000. That same year he staged his first solo show of photographs, The Kids Are Alright, inside an abandoned warehouse in New York’s SoHo neighborhood. He sent his self-published catalogue of the exhibition to curators, artists, and magazine editors he admired, and it garnered attention from Sylvia Wolf, a curator of photography at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Wolf championed his work, and in 2003, at 25 years of age, McGinley had an exhibition as part of the museum’s First Exposure series, making him the youngest artist ever to have a solo show at the institution. McGinley gravitated to street culture early on in his adolescence and began hanging out with a band of self-proclaimed “outsiders”—skateboarders, club kids, graffiti artists, queer-identified youths, and indie musicians—in New Jersey and downtown Manhattan. What began as candid shots of his and his friends’ lifestyle are now seen as iconic snapshots of his generation. McGinley’s early photographs show beautiful, young, nude, and androgynous youth raving, getting high, skinny dipping, hanging precariously from rooftops, shoplifting, running, falling, cavorting, and living with hedonistic abandon, exuberance, and rebellion. McGinley’s friends are willing collaborators, keenly aware of the camera while displaying a candor and frankness that subvert the banality of their everyday lives as they help to create images that are powerful, enticing visions of a new-bohemian coterie. Although they resonate with photographs by Nan Goldin and the films of Larry Clark and Gus Van Sant, McGinley’s works eschew the tragedy and impending doom his predecessors often conveyed in their depictions of marginalized subcultures. Instead, his photos suggest a glee and freedom in keeping with the quintessential notion of youth testing the boundaries of life. In his early works in particular, McGinley seems to evoke Dionysus—the god of wine, art, and ecstasy surrounded by naked, androgynous youths whom he liberates by allowing them to thwart convention and unselfconsciously indulge in pleasure. McGinley’s work has evolved from making documentary photographs to orchestrating scenes where he directs people according to his creative vision. What began as a summer road trip to Vermont where he took photos of friends in the backwoods spawned several annual summer cross-country road trips. With the vast American landscape as the backdrop, Sun and Health (2006) shows his friends carefree while boating, rolling down sand dunes, and running through open fields. In I Know Where the Summer Goes (2008), his team gaily traverses nude across the great outdoors, and the scenes are aided by special effects such as fireworks and fog machines, which add a sense of surrealism to the photos. Moonmilk (2009) captures a group exploring America’s uncharted underground caves that drip with multicolored crystal deposits. For Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (2010), McGinley took intimate, high-gloss, digital black-and-white shots of mostly strangers, while Animals (2012) features portraits of wild animals paired with nude models against bright, sorbet-colored backgrounds. Yearbook (2014) retains the studio look of Animals, featuring over five hundred nude portraits, all with brightly colored, generic backdrops, installed to cover every inch of the gallery’s walls and ceiling. McGinley has had solo exhibitions at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS1), New York (2004); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Spain (2005); Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam (2007); Ratio 3, San Francisco (2010, 2013); and the Daelim Museum, Seoul (2013–14). Group exhibitions include those at Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (2004); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2007); Brooklyn Museum (2009–10); and Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2010). McGinley lives and works in New York.