Two Photographers, Both Revealing friends/If you are a photo enthusiast, this one is for you.

Two Photographers, Both Revealing Friends

Ryan McGinley: Everyone Knows This Is Nowhere at Team Gallery through April 17

Catherine Opie: Girlfriends at Barbara Gladstone Gallery through April 24

Time was when photography was a kind of bastard stepchild to an art world that disallowed this craft the exaltation that attended the canon of painting, drawing and sculpture. If the video, installation and performance arts have been given a wider berth of acceptance in the last 20 years, this might be owed to the folly of decades-long deliberation over the mechanical art of photography having a place in exhibition. It does. And no more so than right now for two practitioners of this art who have respective solo shows: Ryan McGinley at Team Gallery and Catherine Opie at Gladstone Gallery. Each possesses an adroit precision for unveiling the secret lives of the worlds they inhabit.

Ryan McGinley has for sometime now been a darling of the art world, having earned his accolades (and the envy of countless of other artists), from the very start of his career; perhaps beginning with his much-resented one-man show at the Whitney, which featured his then-métier: the Polaroid portrait—and scads of them, depicting his friends in various states of undress or just plain nude and the debauchery of their parties. Not exactly new since Warhol, to be sure—but is anything new since Warhol? What’s perhaps new for McGinley, at least this time around, is his location shift: from the grungy apartments and cross-country American landscapes of past work to the somewhat grown-up confines of his New York studio. In this splendid exhibition called Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, he has captured a series of black and white portraits (yes, nudes), in which the subjects—young men and women, all androgynously smooth—are laid bare more earnestly than their nakedness alone could ever reveal: their interior lives an exchange of currency for the pleasure of our viewing. Subjectively not unlike Larry Clark, to whom he’s been likened, McGinley’s strength in elegantly apprehending the budding sexuality of what appear to be pubescent teens is done so without apology. This isn’t kiddie porn, after all: the models are all at least 18, even if they don’t seem so. And that ambiguity only reinforces our quarrel with this taunting sense of arousal, as these young people languorously testify to the awareness of desire that lurks within us all from the moment we reach maturation.

Of these 74 gelatin silver prints, all framed identically, some are exuberant; while others remain expressionless, perhaps even blasé, about the notion of their suspended objectification. Others suggest a kind of post-coital bliss in which afterglow is an emotional occupation: contemplative, perhaps, and even, at turns, somewhat melancholy. In addition to these black and white photographs, the exhibition also includes three large-scale images in color gels blown large and shot at longer exposures without natural light, including previews of his new “Night Sky” series, in which his naked subjects are seen almost as apparitions against the vast expanse of twilight time; and one of his cave-series photographs from a previous show, called Moonmilk, last fall in London. Fittingly, the catalogue for this current exhibition at Team contains a conversation between McGinley and his friend, Catherine Opie, who occupies a similar plinth for arresting portraiture, and whose never-before-seen photographs at Gladstone Gallery comprise Girlfriends with equal transgression.

For Opie, the show collects itself around an unabashedly forthright and provocative subject matter she knows well: the butch dyke. Verily, Opie has explored the trope of LGBT imagery in the past, photographing various friends and lovers; some others of whom appear here as large color portraits in a startling confrontation with the viewer. This most intriguing examination of the masculine woman as a subject of desire includes such celebrities as musician k.d. lang, poet Eileen Myles and The L Word actresses Daniela Sea (“Moira”/”Max”) and Katherine Moennig (“Shane”), among others not so famous, who emerge as unvarnished, aggressive, radical representations of butch women—or womyn?

“Pretty” is in the eye of any beholder, of course; and here only a conceptual adjective in this survey of heroic integrity, where challenging gender norms has long enabled the bull dyke her appropriation of representational male pageantry. She’s the cock of the walk in Opie’s eyes, you bet, flouting the chokehold of beauty so well beyond the obvious signifiers of a feminine vocabulary that she breathes a whole other air. If we at first wince at what mistakenly appears as the hostile countenance on the faces of these subjects—some of whom wear their more evident battle scars: deliberate body mutations, whether tattooed and/or pierced, along with a proud display of natural facial/body hair and the process of aging without demulcent remedy—we also respect the courageous allowance these corporeal histories reveal. It’s one thing to embrace the theoretical disavowal of a restrictive gender binary, but it takes real balls to make manifest the articulation of one’s truth. It is this ineffable conjunction of identity that Opie so masterfully and so gracefully captures in her photographs.

Image credits in order of appearance:

Ryan McGinley images courtesy of Team Gallery and the artist

Marcel
2009
gelatin silver print
18 x 13.5 inches
edition of three

Night Sky (Green)
2010
c-print
72 x 110 inches
edition of three

Catherine Opie images courtesy of Gladstone Gallery, New York
Copyright Catherine Opie

Kate, 2007
Chromogenic print
30 x 40 inches (76.2 x 101.6 cm)

Julie (play piercing), 1994
Ink jet print
9 1/2 x 10 inches (24.1 x 25.4 cm)