Ryan McGinley was born 1977 in Ramsey, New Jersey. He received a BFA in graphic design at Parsons School of Design, New York, in 2000. Furthermore, that same year he staged his first solo show of photographs, The Kids Are Alright. It was inside an abandoned warehouse in New York’s SoHo neighbourhood. McGinley sent his self-published catalogue of the exhibition to curators, artists, and magazine editors he admired. Consequently, garnered attention from Sylvia Wolf, a curator of photography at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Wolf championed his work, and in 2003, at 25 years of age, McGinley had an exhibition as part of the museum’s First Exposure series, making him the youngest artist ever to have a solo show at the institution.
Two themes are presented in this book — first, a collection of b&w studio nudes, many with wild animals, an extension of the studio series “Everybody Knows This is Nowhere”. The second features one of McGinley’s core elements as a photographer, “capturing his subjects in dreamlike compositions, rich in motion and colour, during recent adventures on the road”. The book is bound in a blue cloth with red text on cover and spine and a red stain to the page edges.