ライアン・マクギンリー： 「光を追いかけることは私の人生のマントラです」

Today, it’s hard to imagine a world where everyone didn’t have a camera in their pockets, attached to their phone. As a result, our relationship to images and image-making have changed a lot over the last 20 years, and few people understand this better than Kathy Ryan, former director of photography at the New York Times Magazine. “I’ve thought from the beginning that [the camera phone] was going to change the look of photography,” she tells Dazed, as her newly-curated exhibition of iPhone photography opens across the world in London, New York, and Shanghai. “What it enables is just an incredible fluidity, and a chance to engage more with serendipity.”

The show, Chasing the Light, features new work by three leading photographers: Ryan McGinley, Prince Gyasi, and Chen Man. McGinley, who is seated beside Ryan in a video call from the NYC opening, adds that – like many photographers – he’s also been using the iPhone since day one, building it directly into his artistic practice. He likes to think of it as just another camera, he explains, in the same family as a Leica, a Nikon, or a Polaroid: “All those cameras have different looks, and they have their own language.”

Back in 2017, McGinley published an edition of EY! Boy with Luis Venegas, written purely in the language of iPhone photography, capturing the first two years of his relationship with his partner – spontaneous moments of intimacy, captured in real time. Chasing the Light features a similar but different sense of fluidity, as McGinley uses the iPhone almost like an extension of his body to capture expressive moments of movement, colour, and light.

Kathy Ryan recalls a moment on the shoot that made it into the exhibition: a model in a red dress of her own design climbs the wall of a barn, with dust swirling in a shaft of sunlight like the interior of a cathedral. “[McGinley] looked down at the ground and saw all the dust and the dirt and broken hay,” Ryan says, “and started tossing it up so it gave this beautiful weight to the air.” It was the dexterity afforded by holding a phone in the palm of his hand that allowed this moment to come to life, she adds. “It’s almost like an athletic ability… or like jazz.”

You can watch this process come together for yourself in a film from the shoot shared exclusively with Dazed. In it, a diverse cast of models and creatives – a photographer, a musician, a choreographer, and a fashion designer – frolick in meadows, dance around fireworks, and take a dip in a lake on a farm in upstate New York. Watch above.

Did the overarching theme of Chasing the Light come naturally to McGinley, as well? “I mean, chasing the light is the mantra of my life,” he says. A learned intuition from decades behind the lens has given him skills akin to a weatherman. “I know exactly where the light will be throughout the day at any moment,” he says, “and how to use it beneficially for a photograph… the palette of the light, and how it will fall on people’s bodies and skin.”

“With somebody like Ryan [McGinley], there’s an enormous amount of thought, and years of looking and thinking and breathing and understanding light,” says Kathy Ryan. “I witnessed that firsthand.” On the morning of the shoot, for example, he spent a couple of hours walking around the farm, earmarking backdrops and bodies of water that would reflect clouds in the late afternoon. Then, the iPhone camera enabled moments of fluidity within these preconceived plans. “It [was] like a collaboration between him, the light, the model, and the phone itself.”

Of course, one of the most important aspects of the cameraphone is that you don’t need to be on the level of Ryan McGinley any more to make and share compelling photographs. “I love how camera phones have democratised photography,” he says. “Nobody wants an industry where you have to be at a certain economic level to enter. We’re going to get so much new, exciting talent just from having a camera on a phone, and that’s beautiful.”

Looking back on the advancements so far, Kathy Ryan agrees. “I think it allowed a lot of people to be creative who didn’t realise they had it in them,” she says. They could become artists without [any] equipment other than their iPhone, and start making pictures. That’s been a great gift to so many people.”

Take a look at some highlights from Chasing the Light, and watch Ryan McGinley’s film from the shoot, above.

Today, it’s hard to imagine a world where everyone didn’t have a camera in their pockets, attached to their phone. As a result, our relationship to images and image-making have changed a lot over the last 20 years, and few people understand this better than Kathy Ryan, former director of photography at the New York Times Magazine. “I’ve thought from the beginning that [the camera phone] was going to change the look of photography,” she tells Dazed, as her newly-curated exhibition of iPhone photography opens across the world in London, New York, and Shanghai. “What it enables is just an incredible fluidity, and a chance to engage more with serendipity.”

The show, Chasing the Light, features new work by three leading photographers: Ryan McGinley, Prince Gyasi, and Chen Man. McGinley, who is seated beside Ryan in a video call from the NYC opening, adds that – like many photographers – he’s also been using the iPhone since day one, building it directly into his artistic practice. He likes to think of it as just another camera, he explains, in the same family as a Leica, a Nikon, or a Polaroid: “All those cameras have different looks, and they have their own language.”

Back in 2017, McGinley published an edition of EY! Boy with Luis Venegas, written purely in the language of iPhone photography, capturing the first two years of his relationship with his partner – spontaneous moments of intimacy, captured in real time. Chasing the Light features a similar but different sense of fluidity, as McGinley uses the iPhone almost like an extension of his body to capture expressive moments of movement, colour, and light.

Kathy Ryan recalls a moment on the shoot that made it into the exhibition: a model in a red dress of her own design climbs the wall of a barn, with dust swirling in a shaft of sunlight like the interior of a cathedral. “[McGinley] looked down at the ground and saw all the dust and the dirt and broken hay,” Ryan says, “and started tossing it up so it gave this beautiful weight to the air.” It was the dexterity afforded by holding a phone in the palm of his hand that allowed this moment to come to life, she adds. “It’s almost like an athletic ability… or like jazz.”

You can watch this process come together for yourself in a film from the shoot shared exclusively with Dazed. In it, a diverse cast of models and creatives – a photographer, a musician, a choreographer, and a fashion designer – frolick in meadows, dance around fireworks, and take a dip in a lake on a farm in upstate New York. Watch above.

Did the overarching theme of Chasing the Light come naturally to McGinley, as well? “I mean, chasing the light is the mantra of my life,” he says. A learned intuition from decades behind the lens has given him skills akin to a weatherman. “I know exactly where the light will be throughout the day at any moment,” he says, “and how to use it beneficially for a photograph… the palette of the light, and how it will fall on people’s bodies and skin.”

“With somebody like Ryan [McGinley], there’s an enormous amount of thought, and years of looking and thinking and breathing and understanding light,” says Kathy Ryan. “I witnessed that firsthand.” On the morning of the shoot, for example, he spent a couple of hours walking around the farm, earmarking backdrops and bodies of water that would reflect clouds in the late afternoon. Then, the iPhone camera enabled moments of fluidity within these preconceived plans. “It [was] like a collaboration between him, the light, the model, and the phone itself.”

Of course, one of the most important aspects of the cameraphone is that you don’t need to be on the level of Ryan McGinley any more to make and share compelling photographs. “I love how camera phones have democratised photography,” he says. “Nobody wants an industry where you have to be at a certain economic level to enter. We’re going to get so much new, exciting talent just from having a camera on a phone, and that’s beautiful.”

Looking back on the advancements so far, Kathy Ryan agrees. “I think it allowed a lot of people to be creative who didn’t realise they had it in them,” she says. They could become artists without [any] equipment other than their iPhone, and start making pictures. That’s been a great gift to so many people.”

Take a look at some highlights from Chasing the Light, and watch Ryan McGinley’s film from the shoot, above.