Sun and Health

Ryan McGinley
Sun and Health

Photographs: Ryan McGinley

Text: Martha Schwenderer

Publisher: Galerie du Jour Agnès B

76 pages

Pictures: 24

Year: 2006

Comments: Hardcover, 205 x 270 mm. First edition, 2006. Text in french and in english. In very good condition.

In McGinley’s works, sex is playful, joyful. This isn’t the fumbling, desperate back-seat sex of Teenage Lust — which serves as an analogue for a whole other level of existential frustration. It’s something different. Groups of nudes splash in the water or lodge themselves in a pine tree. The figure merges with the landscape — often literally. The sun washes out bodies in the desert; a torso slips into water. And bodies merge together.

McGinley is characteristically candid about his inspiration for this series. It’s not the photography one would find in galleries or museums — the fuzzy pictorialism of Steichen or the roaming road-trip camera of Friedlander. Rather, he’s turned to the vernacular : that great sea of photographs created by amateurs, “lay” photographers who like to document their friends and themselves at leisure in the buff, riding motorcycles, boating, camping, scuba diving, consuming nature.

(From the introduction by Martha Schwenderer)