Ryan McGinley — Sun and Health

"...In his new series of photographs, Ryan McGinley combines all of these things: bohemia, America, the road trip, the search for some kind of freedom. For the last two summers he's taken vanloads of friends who double as subjects on road trips across the United States and photographed them in motels and houses, campsites and landscapes ranging from forests to deserts. The subjects are young, kind of beautiful, and romantically reckless. They carry names - Jake or Lily or Tim - but we don't know anything about them. They exist in a halo-world of light and beauty, like models in an editorial or ad spread. Only they get to do what those models only hint at doing. They get fucked up and have sex and fight and lie out on the desert sand, naked. They bungee jump and skinny dip in rivers and streams. Nothing comes between them and the great American outdoors." — Excerpt from the introduction by Martha Schwenderer