Ryan Mcginley

Ryan McGinley, one of the most important photographers of his generation, asks his friends and colleagues to take the camera into their own hands. Following instructions given to them by the artist, a group of individuals explore their own image. Ryan McGinley, since the earliest days of his unparalleled career, has chronicled his friends and cohorts. Whether on the now legendary annual road trips he has organized with a large coterie of twentysomethings documenting summertime exploits or documenting the early gritty years in downtown New York, McGinley is known as the consummate storyteller about freedom and abandon of youth. A few years ago, however, he wanted to challenge his creative habits and asked more than one hundred of his friends and colleagues--guided by detailed instructions and a camera given to them by the artist--to take nude self-portraits using mirrors and other props. Though related to the ubiquitous selfie, the participants didn't have the benefit of seeing the image before they clicked the shutter. Furthermore, McGinley would make the selection of the final image to represent the photo session. The experiment yielded scores of intimate and psychologically revealing photos that--even though not done by his own hand--bear some signature McGinley flourishes in their emotional depth and resonance.

The first book to examine Ryan McGinley’s early photographs and Polaroids—raw, visceral portraits of his coterie of friends and artists in downtown New York City. Published to accompany an exhibition at Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Ryan McGinley: The Kids Were Alright focuses on the photographer’s early work from 1998 to 2003, the year of his solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. These early photographs and Polaroids—many of which have never been exhibited or published— document his friends and collaborators in downtown New York City. In the process, McGinley created a powerful portrait of his generation and their often debauched lifestyle: gritty, daring, and focused on moments of both pleasure and tedium. McGinley’s singular ability to capture the mood and emotional depth of a moment is evident even from the earliest years of his career. Curator Nora Burnett Abrams offers the most comprehensive consideration to date of this important work in her essay, and other contributions— including an interview with McGinley and artist Dan Colen and several short reminiscences from many of his subjects and social circle at the time— will provide context and commentary on the more than 100 works in the volume.

A visually arresting collection of new works by emerging artists and celebrated names, united around a simple premise. The first in an exciting new series, Feelings: Soft Art is an intimate exploration of contemporary art today. Focused on material qualities and the feelings evoked by a work, this thematic approach returns to the basic pleasure of experiencing art. An easy, evocative look at artists and their projects, this heavily illustrated publication features hands-on insight from within the art world and without. Drawing on hundreds of new paintings, sculptures, photographs, and other practices, extended essays develop common threads. Brief texts and interviews reveal the making of soft works and artists’ relationships with the materials they use.

A unique visual archive by master photographer Joel Meyerowitz.

This book edited by Jérôme Sans draws a Lipstick panorama within the world of contemporary art photography. Fully illustrated it is conceived as a magazine or a rhapsody without any beginning or end. Throughout the pages unfurls a new history of the relationship with Lipstick. A story that shows how this feminine symbol with particular flavor has pervaded our culture and its imagery. The book brings together more than 40 international artists and their work from Andy Warhol's self-portrait to intimate pictures of Araki and Nan Goldin, collapsed compositions of Maurizio Cattelan and Pier Paolo Ferrari. Sublimed, made-up, eroticized, parodied ... these traces of contemporary cult accoutrement has become an iconic element of contemporary values. A sexy book to be kissed.

An authentic compendium of 1970s' New York style and attitude and a confirmed masterpiece. Idols began with an awestruck Larrain visiting Kansas City in the explosively liberating early years of the gay rights movement and befriending Taylor Meade and John Noble. Once they had been photographed, the rest of the troupe followed suit. The result is a collection of photographs of a generation of New York's most talented, outrageous, glamorous and mostly gay personalities who posed for Larrain in his now legendary Soho studio.

Andrew Durbin's Mature Themes is a hybrid text of poetry, art criticism, and memoir focused on the subject of disingenuity-and what constitutes "personal experience" both online and IRL when to "go deep" in a culture of so many unreliable communication technologies is to resend a text at 3 AM. Throughout the book, Durbin's voice mutates into others in order to uncover the fading specters of meaning buried under the pristine surfaces of art and Hollywood, locating below them the other realities that structure our experience of both.

Brooklyn has seen exponential change over the past fifteen years, and this book presents the best work of the photographers from all over the world who have been capturing those changes and movements in cityscapes, portraits, vignettes, and process-oriented photography. Brooklyn Photographs Now reflects the avant-garde spirit of the city’s hippest borough, containing previously unpublished work by well-known and emerging contemporary artists. The book presents 250 images by more than seventy-five established and new artists, including Mark Seliger, Jamel Shabazz, Ryan McGinley, Mathieu Bitton, and Michael Eastman, among many others. The book documents the physical and architectural landscape and reflects and explores an off-centered—and therefore a less-seen and more innovative—perspective of how artists view this borough in the twenty-first century. This is the “now” Brooklyn that we have yet to see in pictures: what might seem to be an alternative city but is actually the crux of how it visually functions in the present day. This unique collection of images is the perfect book for the photo lover and sophisticated tourist alike.