Lauren JacksonApril 10, 2013

Ryan McGinley & The Life Adjustment Center

I was originally drawn to Ryan McGinley last year when I was working on a project that

incorporated photographs of my twenty-something year old friends. I found McGinley’s

photographs instantly captivating. Up until this semester, I had only seen his photographs online,

but after seeing his book, The Life Adjustment Center, this semester, I was immediately reminded

of why I had originally come to love his work. In an interview with McGinley in The New York

Times Style Magazine (2012), McGinley described his initial work as beginning by just taking

photographs of everything, loving nature, and loving nudity. The Life Adjustment Center inspired

me to stretch somewhat out of my comfort range, and for this project I decided focus more on the

human body and human form. As my project slowly evolved from the initial inspiration of Ryan

McGinley, the overarching theme of my project became “the body resembling nature and nature

resembling the body.” I took three main inspirations from the book: McGinley’s use of two

tandem series appearing in one book, the use of color, and the simplicity of his layout.

McGinley’s book includes two series, a series of black and white in-studio photographs

of models with animals, and another series in color of his friends outdoors. In the first series

McGinley used an array of animals to pose with his models. In an interview with McGinley in

The New York Times Style Magazine (2012) McGinley described the inspiration for

incorporating animals to have sprung from seeing his friends interact with animals in the

outdoors. In a video provided by Dashwood Books (2010), the caption describes the second

series as 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’.” Both series

feature almost all of the models and friends of McGinley in the nude.

For my project, I decided to do two similar series, one indoor series featuring nude

models posing with objects that resemble the human body, specifically the female form. I used

both natural objects and man-made objects. These objects are somewhat equated to the animals

McGinley poses his models with, although much less dangerous. One major difference in my

series, however, is that I kept my models anonymous by not using their faces. I did this for two

reasons, one, in order to encourage my friends to model for me, and two to force people to notice

the form of the human body and the object used in the image. Photographing models nude,

however, was difficult. In an interview with McGinley in The New York Times (2010), McGinley

said he also faced difficulties but got over that by “spend(ing) 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.”

My second series featured more anonymous nudity, but outdoors. I placed my models in

the landscape and captured the line of their bodies with the natural setting. Originally I intended

for the bodies to somewhat blend in with the landscape, but they did not. However, I really

enjoyed the way the smoothness of the bodies contradicted with the roughness of the surfaces I

choose. The lines of the bodies however, did emulate the changing lines of the landscape. For the

entire project I decided to work only with the female form. I felt that allowing men to be in the

photographs with objects from resembling the human form would be alluding too much to size

and shape, and start to send a different message than I intended. I also find the female form to be

beautiful and to work well for this project. In a review of McGinley’s work in The New York

Times, 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.” Although, I choose not to incorporate males or multi-person images

with my project, I would be interested in incorporating more of the dynamics McGinley captures,

in my later work.

McGinley’s use of color is also inspirational. Although McGinley chose to do his indoor

series in black and white, I chose do to both of my series in color. McGinley uses vibrant and

rich colors in his outdoor photographs and I wanted to do the same thing. I edited the images of

enhance all of the colors and sharpness of the photographs. Even though I did do my indoor

series in color, I choose to do them in muted and warm tones. The vast array of places in

McGinley’s photographs was hard to achieve since he got so many from traveling the country,

but I tried to do my best to capture several settings in my photographs as well.

Lastly I liked the simplicity of McGinley’s layout in The Life Adjustment Center. He used

only one image per page, although some were full bleeds. McGinley used a large amount of

white space, which I really enjoyed. The book was also somewhat small, the size of a novel,

although not as long. He did not use any text except for on the final page, where he gave credit to

all his models, which is something I have considered doing. The simplicity, I felt, helped the

viewer to focus simply on the image.

McGinley’s Life Adjustment Center captured several elements that I have always wanted

to incorporate into my work. This project gave me the opportunity to try things outside of my

comfort zone, while also working with many of the elements that I am interested in. I hope that

my book, Bloom, captures some of the spirit of McGinley’s work.