Ryan McGinley Quotes

You have to be able to observe life as if you were a camera all the time, constantly looking at light and the way that things are placed and the way people hold themselves. You need the ability to see something in someone or something that no one else really sees and be able to bring that to light. Basically, you have to be an obsessive crazy person.

I didn't have much of a life in crime as a graffiti writer.

My photographs are a celebration of life, fun and the beautiful. They are a world that doesn't exist. A fantasy. Freedom is real. There are no rules. The life I wish I was living.

A lot of my close friends have committed suicide or died of heroin overdoses.

I think that's an important lesson for young people who want to be artists: You have to find someone who believes in you and who will help you find that time where you don't have to think about a job but just making work. If I didn't have those people in my life, I wouldn't be in the position I'm in.

I have a really big family, and pretty much all my work is about my brothers and sisters. I'm the youngest of eight - my mom had seven kids in seven years, and then she had me 11 years later - so I was basically raised by all these teenagers.

I've been attracted to Kate Moss since I was a teenager.

Just having the camera, being able to pull back from situations and be an observer, it saved my life... I realised I could find these intimate moments and that people trusted me. That, basically, my camera was magic.

It's weird being a photographer because you really have to divorce yourself from the image.

I don't want to be an artist that gets stuck doing one thing. I don't want to be an artist who people look back at and say, 'His early work was really great.

I think the driving force when I moved to New York was the fear of going home with my tail between my legs.

You find the people that you need to find. There's this gravitational pull.

A lot of artists need structure.

Just being friends with people now for over 15 years, you realize what we all came out of. What we came out of was the intense feeling of growing up. It sounds kind of cliché, but it's true.

A lot of people, even my parents, thought, "Art school, I don't know. We'll support you but the success rate for artists is really slim."

I put all of my time into art because I couldn't go back to Jersey and work at Starbucks.

I didn't have to be friends with people who were into pop music.

In college, all my friends were graffiti writers, but I never wrote graffiti. I wanted to participate and do something cool on the street, so I'd make these portraits of people. I'd isolate them on a white wall, make a silkscreen of it, and do these portraits in bathrooms and all around. That's how I started the Polaroids.

When I was in art school, the photo kids were separated from the rest. If you did sculpture or painting or graphic design, you were all taking the same classes, but the photographers just went straight into photography.

Growing up, my room was covered in posters. I was like, "I want to make posters."

I was studying graphic design at the time, when negative scanners and all that stuff was coming out, and you could do it all in your apartment. So I would shoot, make contact sheets, scan all the cool negatives, and make all these zines and books of my photos to give to my friends. I was really into zine- and bookmaking from skate culture.

The cool part about New York is that you can do that. You can talk to all the people you admire.

I got a lot of attention when I was really young, and people have it in their minds that I'm still 24 years old. So I made the decision that I had photographed everything I was interested in in New York. New York is a town you have to embrace, but you also need to leave. I may revisit it one day, but for me it's a place to live rather than one to make work in.

I want to venture into film more, and I think that a nice way to transition into doing that would be a documentary. I think it would be interesting to find one person that really fascinated me or maybe a band and travel with them, but I don't think I could do it like I used to do it.

I slowly began making a few photos with animals over the years, and I liked how people reacted to them. When I would have the animals on set, I'd notice the way the models would interact with them and there was so much true emotion that you rarely see between two human beings.

All my work, really, is based on my brothers and sisters. I had so many adventures with them and a big part of the work is to recreate those. It's easy for me to be around a lot of people, because I can retreat. I can watch everything.

My dad was in the Korean War. He got shot seven times. He had seven bullet holes in him. And out of his troop of 35 guys, he was one of nine guys that came back. And when he came back from that he had seven kids in seven years.

I'm just a photographer, not a movie star.

I'm interested in reaching the masses with my work. It's one of my goals.

I went through a pretty big David Bowie period when I was younger, and that has affected me profoundly in my life and my work.

There was no luxury. I never got on an airplane until I was 18. We drove everywhere. My dad was like, "Waste not, want not."

I have absolutely no interest in creating depressing images.

I was pretty Irish Catholic Jersey, the middle of the line.

I couldn't wait to come to New York to reinvent myself.

My mom had seven kids in seven years, and then she had me 11 years later. So when I was born, my oldest brother was 18. And my youngest brother was 11. By the time I was 7 or 8, everyone had moved out. I went from being with ten people all the time to being an only child. It really freaked me out.

I was growing up in the suburbs; I was one of eight kids. So I did have a community when I was younger, but all of my brothers and sisters were older.

The cool thing for me about moving to New York was that I got to create a new family.

I think a lot about control nowadays, and I really want to let go and just be more in the moment.

A camera gives you a purpose.

The thing about being a photographer that's so cool is that you get to participate, but you also get to disappear. The camera is in front of your face all the time.

Whatever emotions you're going through, you somehow seek out the people that are going through similar emotions or that maybe have something you need.

What I really believe is that there are no coincidences anymore.

When I moved to New York, I was still in the closet.

Everyone started to have a camera. That's when I started to travel outside of New York and go into nature.

I really don't want to be part of just one group. I'm interested in doing everything - making music videos, shooting campaigns, having -gallery and museum shows, making movies. Everyone wants to put you in a box, and I'm afraid I'm not that kind of person.

From 8 to 19, I was skateboarding every single day. That was my life. I worked at a skate shop. I watched skate videos.

Actually, I didn't study photography at first. I went to school for painting my first year, poetry my second year, graphic design my third and fourth year, and photography my fifth.

The camera gives you some control.

I'm making the art for me first. I'm making it because these are the pictures I want to see. I'm making pictures that don't yet exist.

In a lot of ways I look at these old photos, and I don't know if I would have been able to communicate with these people on this level if I didn't have a camera. I think I would still be so shy.