Lauren JacksonPersonal Project

Annotated Bibliography

(2010). Ryan McGinley: Life adjustment center. The World’s Best Ever.

This is simply an overview about this book, with a video provided by Dashwood Books. The Video flips through the book to allow the viewer to see the book even without having possession of it. The bulk of the text is spent of describing the book, “Two themes are presented in this book, firstly a collection of b&w studio nudes many with wild animals, an extension of the studio series ‘Everybody Knows This is Nowhere’. The second features one of McGinley’s core elements as a photographer, ‘capturing his subjects in dreamlike compositions, rich in motion and color, during recent adventures on the road’.”

Chang, M. (2012). Ryan McGinley’s menagerie. The New York Times Style Magazine.

This article is an interview with McGinley about a separate body of work, that stemmed from his original black and white photographs contained in Life Adjustment Center. Although the article does not directly discuss the book, the article gave a good insight into McGinley’s strategies. He described his initial work as beginning by just taking photographs of everything, loving nature, and loving nudity. His original inspiration for incorporating animals into portraits was because of seeing his models (his friends) interact with animals in the wild, such as seen in the photograph of the young man with the frog. When asked about his previous work, which is described as more documentary style, McGinley says he doubts he will ever go back to that way of working.

Cotter, H. (2003). Art in review: The kids are alright, photographs by Ryan McGinley. New York Times.

This article, featured in the New York Times in 2003, focused on one of the series of photographs contained in McGinley’s book Life Adjustment Center. In particular the review focused on the color nude photographs taken outdoors of McGinley’s friends. Those included in the images are McGinley’s peers at the time, other twenty-somethings traveling the country. Cotter (2003) focused on the interactions between the same sexes in some of the photographs, “Mr. McGinley's approach to sexuality is one of the interesting things about his work. Same-sex attachments predominate, but there is no ''gay style'' in evidence, or at least not a familiar or obvious one.”

Silva, H. (2010). Studio visit: Ryan McGinley. New York Times.

This article is another interview with Ryan McGinley, but this one specifically focused on the black and white portraits included in Life Adjustment Center. Again McGinley discussed his technique. The portraits were the first time he shot digitally and took between 1,000 to 2,000 portraits of each person. McGinley described his tactic for

photographing the models, “I spend about three hours with each of the models. I have cards that actors use to kind of pull emotion — they have expressions on them like ‘sad,’ ‘demure,’ ‘jealous’ — and I have cards that have pictures of Bart Simpson or SpongeBob with really silly expressions. It just gets people in the zone, and it gives me options.” McGinley also discussed how he likes having androgynous models and the influence of David Bowie, as well as the influence of having seven older siblings.