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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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Ryan McGinley
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: October 17
Photographer
Ramsey
New Jersey
Art
Portfolios
School
Ticket
Hard
Suburbs
Really
Scholarship
Tickets
Develop
Worked
Knew
Portfolio

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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Most of the e-mails I get nowadays are from students who ask me how I got my start. In truth its from having a really supportive family but also having a good patron who will help you - like financing all those early trips I took.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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.
Ryan McGinley
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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.
Ryan McGinley
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From 8 to 19, I was skateboarding every single day. That was my life. I worked at a skate shop. I watched skate videos.
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.
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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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I'm always interested in an atmosphere where dreams and reality mingle on equal terms.
Ryan McGinley
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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.
Ryan McGinley
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I'm going to put every aspect of myself out into the world and try to convey it through photography.
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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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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A lot of my close friends have committed suicide or died of heroin overdoses.
Ryan McGinley
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It's weird being a photographer because you really have to divorce yourself from the image.
Ryan McGinley