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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.

Ryan McGinley

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Ryan McGinley
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: October 17
Photographer
Ramsey
New Jersey
Really
Gets
People
Artist
Back
Look
Looks
Great
Thing
Stuck
Work
Early

More quotes by Ryan McGinley

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The cool thing for me about moving to New York was that I got to create a new family.
Ryan McGinley
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Everyone I'm photographing, I feel like I'm remaking a family, in a way. My brothers and sisters are my heroes. So many of my models resemble them.
Ryan McGinley
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You find the people that you need to find. There's this gravitational pull.
Ryan McGinley
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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.
Ryan McGinley
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I spent all of my money on film. I remember I would do these set-design jobs or transcribe or just anything to get, like, a $100 check and go immediately to Adorama and buy expired film.
Ryan McGinley
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I know that my mind is so A.D.D., and I want instant gratification - and photography can provide me with that - but at some point, I want to make an independent feature.
Ryan McGinley
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I didn't have to be friends with people who were into pop music.
Ryan McGinley
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I put all of my time into art because I couldn't go back to Jersey and work at Starbucks.
Ryan McGinley
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Everyone started to have a camera. That's when I started to travel outside of New York and go into nature.
Ryan McGinley
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I'm interested in reaching the masses with my work. It's one of my goals.
Ryan McGinley
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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.
Ryan McGinley
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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.
Ryan McGinley
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I knew my ticket out of the suburbs was art school, so I worked really hard to develop my portfolio and get a scholarship.
Ryan McGinley
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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.
Ryan McGinley
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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.
Ryan McGinley
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The cool part about New York is that you can do that. You can talk to all the people you admire.
Ryan McGinley
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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.
Ryan McGinley
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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.
Ryan McGinley
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I'm always interested in an atmosphere where dreams and reality mingle on equal terms.
Ryan McGinley
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All I do is make photos. It's my life.
Ryan McGinley