People running naked across fields, friends frozen in midair. Think of photographs of youth made since the mid-2000s, and Ryan McGinley’s pictures come to mind first. “Night Shift,” the solo show he opened in New York this summer, is far from those daylight pictures. He photographed the five boroughs of New York between 9 p.m. and 5 a.m.

The Youngest from New Jersey

McGinley was born on October 17, 1977, in Ramsey, New Jersey, the youngest of eight children. He studied graphic design, painting, and poetry at Parsons School of Design and graduated in 2000. He started taking pictures around 1998. The first people he pointed the camera at were the friends he spent time with in New York.

A Taped-Together Portfolio, the Whitney at 25

Before anyone knew his name, he made a photo book himself. He took the title, “The Kids Are Alright,” from the film about the band The Who. It was a handmade book of inkjet prints held together with double-sided tape. Around the time he was about to graduate, he held his first show in an empty space in SoHo (420 West Broadway) and sold the book there. He sent the remaining copies himself to galleries, magazines, and artists he admired.

One of those copies reached Sylvia Wolf, the photography curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Wolf saw the book and put together a show. That was the solo show of the same name, “The Kids Are Alright,” on view from February 1 to May 18, 2003. He was 25, and he became one of the youngest artists to have a solo show at the Whitney. The same year, American Photo named him Photographer of the Year, and in 2007 the International Center of Photography (ICP) gave him its Young Photographer award.

A Yashica T4 in His Pocket

Most of the pictures from those years were shot on a Yashica T4, a 35mm point-and-shoot with a Carl Zeiss lens. He learned about the camera from the skate magazine Big Brother. He has called the magazine his bible at the time, and he bought one after reading a piece by the photographer Earl Parker that praised the T4.

The biggest reason he chose the T4 was its size. It fit in his pocket. From 1999 to 2003 he went out almost every night, carrying ten rolls of film in his pockets and shooting whatever happened in front of him. In bars he shot with nothing but ISO 1600 film and fluorescent light, and he used the self-timer to photograph himself. The camera was weatherproof, so he could pull it out even where water was splashing. He describes most of the pictures from that time as close to documentation. Rather than staging scenes, he watched like a fly on the wall.

The camera stayed in his bag after that. When he published a photo book in 2012, he named the Yashica T4 among the cameras he used, along with a Leica R8 and a Canon 5D. We wrote about what kind of camera it is in “Yashica T4: A Carl Zeiss Lens That Fits in Your Pocket”.

Three Months, Every Summer

Say McGinley and road trips come up. In 2005, after returning from the set of a film by director Mike Mills, he organized a shooting trip of his own. He took about ten friends and models and crossed the United States over three months. After that he made the same trip every summer. Planning started in January. He would first settle on one scene he wanted to shoot, then plan the route around it.

With the road trips, the way he shot changed. On top of a planned scene he layered the models’ movement and whatever chance the day brought. That is why the bodies in his pictures are always caught in motion.

Yearbook (Rizzoli), published in 2024, has a slightly different feel. It collects ten years of nude portraits of friends and collaborators shot in the studio. The faces are playful, and their feelings show plainly.

Whistle for the Wind and Sigur Rós

The book that gathered the photographs of his road trip years was Whistle for the Wind, published by Rizzoli in 2012. It was the first major survey of his work, a 240-page monograph with texts by the writer Chris Kraus, the critic John Kelsey, and the filmmaker Gus Van Sant. It holds the days he spent on the road with friends every summer, and people in their twenties running naked across fields and lakes.

A nude figure runs across a dry field beneath a cloudy sky.

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“Running Field” (2007). A nude figure runs across a dry field. Ryan McGinley
A nude figure stretches their limbs in midair above a field with mountains behind them.

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“Ann (Slingshot)” (2007). A nude figure hangs above a field. Ryan McGinley

These photographs are also what made McGinley widely known in Korea. From November 2013 to the following February, the Daelim Museum in Seoul held his first solo show in the country, “Youth, a Brilliant Record.” It hung everything from his early New York photographs to the road trip series, the series shot with animals, and his black-and-white studio portraits. Because of the nudity in some works, minors could only visit with a guardian. In 2016, Willbook published the Korean edition titled Ryan McGinley Collection: Whistle for the Wind.

Many people saw his photographs outside a museum first. The cover of “Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust,” the album the Icelandic band Sigur Rós released in 2008, is a McGinley photograph. It shows young people from behind, running naked across a road. A flyer photo for his exhibition “I Know Where the Summer Goes” reportedly reached the singer Jónsi just as he was thinking about the album's image. McGinley had come to know the band a few years earlier, when he photographed Jónsi.

On the Sigur Rós album cover, four nude figures run toward a road beneath a bright sky.

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“Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust” (2008) album cover. Four nude figures run toward a road. Photography by Ryan McGinley / Sigur Rós, 2008

“Night Shift,” New York at Night

“Night Shift” ran from June 13 to August 8 at Jeffrey Deitch (18 Wooster Street) in SoHo, New York. It was his first solo show in New York in nearly ten years. The photographs were taken over the course of 2025, between 9 p.m. and 5 a.m. He shot on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday nights, when the streets are quietest.

He changed his method too. He set slow shutter speeds, used telephoto lenses, and fired wireless flashes only at the people. He stood a block or two away from the models and directed their movements by phone or walkie-talkie. The bodies hit by the flash come out sharp, while the city behind them turns into streaks of light over the long exposure. Body and city blend in a single frame.

Three nude figures surround Bethesda Fountain and the Angel of the Waters at night.

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“Bethesda Fountain, Central Park” (2026). Water flows beneath the angel statue at night. Ryan McGinley
Two overlapping nude figures stand before the K Bridge under red light.

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“K Bridge, Queens” (2026). A red-lit span and two figures in motion. Ryan McGinley

The locations are places any New Yorker knows. The Kosciuszko (K) Bridge linking Brooklyn and Queens, Fort Greene Park, Lincoln Center, the Angel of the Waters at Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, and the Cyclone roller coaster at Coney Island. Spots that are packed with people by day become, late at night, a stage left with only one person’s body and light.

A nude figure runs with one arm raised in front of the Coney Island Cyclone.

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“Coney Island Cyclone, Brooklyn” (2026). A runner crosses streaks of light before the Cyclone. Ryan McGinley

How different is New York at night from the pictures of friends running through fields by day? Both catch the moment a body is in motion. This time, though, the stage is the city he has lived in for years. A photographer who has shot youth for more than twenty years is now looking again at the city he lives in.

Info

More about the show is on the Jeffrey Deitch exhibition page. The gallery also published a catalogue to accompany the show.