March 18th, at 5:55pm or so, there was already a sizable group of people waiting to get into Ryan McGinley's new show of black and white photographic portraits at Team Gallery, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (through April 17). Mainly they were young people, and some of them were the subjects of the nude photos themselves.
Some of them even shyly stood next to their nudes, but a few of them looked sweetly skittish when anyone asked them to pose with their portrait. McGinley is known for his nude subjects, but he skirts all obvious sexual appeal; he likes physical awkwardness, and if this awkwardness is erotic, it's disarming, pimply, bad breath eroticism, the kind that emerges from low expectations, good weed and the ability to laugh at practically anything.
McGinley achieves his distinctive romanticism in a roundabout way that depends on killing any idealized ideas about people and their skin and the images they present the world. I was born in 1977, the same year as McGinley, and I spent my early twenties hanging out in New Jersey, so I feel like the world of most of his photos is a world I know and love. What sets his work apart is the little stab at utopia that McGinley is trying to provide, the kind of utopia where we don't care if we're gay or straight or beautiful or homely but we all dissolve into each other as a group of arms and legs and blissfully stoned minds. At his best, his work reminds me of the films of Jacques Demy, another gay dreamer who did his best work in praise of heterosexual love fantasies of both triumph (Lola, 1961) and defeat (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, 1964).
