The plan is to sit in as he shoots nudes. These girls, like the tens of models (male and female) that Ryan McGinley shoots in his studio each week, have been scouted. Phoebe, one of his many assistants, hits the streets in search of faces, hanging around downtown, roaming the campuses of art schools. She knows what he likes.

It doesn’t seem to occur to anybody that the models might be made uncomfortable by my presence. McGinley, 36, one of the world’s most successful and omnipresent photographers, projects the authority of a confident, truant teenager. Whereas many people would at least pay lip service to the potential problems a reporter might pose (naked young people, a stranger taking notes), McGinley doesn’t bother. The effect of this assumptive apathy is that he always gets what he wants.

McGinley’s workspace, which he’s occupied for ten years, is lined with art books, strewn with snacks, and shares a wall with a Chinese bridal studio. There’s the usual phalanx of lank-haired, androgynous-looking kids. (Uniform: T-shirt + tight pants + comically utilitarian boots.) Many people have keys. An Olivier Theyskens look-alike leads me back to the studio, which is kept toasty and bright. When the frst girl comes in, McGinley introduces himself, hugs her, and instructs her to undress and throw her clothes on the couch. Madison is the girl’s name, and she looks like Audrey Hepburn with a semi-buzz cut. She lives in Brooklyn, reviews music for a blog, and works as a seamstress at a downtown atelier that services drag queens. Check, check, check.

All this information is extracted not by McGinley but by Brandee, his hype girl, whom he calls Boo Boo. Brandee’s here to talk to the models and get them comfortable so that McGinley can get a natural shot. Can a person’s name evoke its homophone? If so, Brandee’s does. Just hearing her talk is probably more effective than three glasses of wine, inhibitions-wise. Have you ever broken any bones? What’s your boyfriend like? What’s with those Canadians who think they’re French? These are the type of questions that occur to Brandee. Her extemporizing is impressively arbitrary and incredibly disarming. She is really great at her job.

Your eyebrows are sick, Brandee tells Madison.

Yeah, I love your eyebrows, adds McGinley.

Technically, eyebrow, Madison says, laughing nervously.

Brandee asks about her years in fashion school and presses Madison when she makes a face that seems to suggest distaste with the industry. Madison says she doesn’t like the people. McGinley nods sympathetically. It’s so tough, he says. This is about as much shit as I’ll hear him talk about anyone or anything during the time we spend together.

McGinley pulls out a trampoline and starts blasting Madonna. Brandee bobs around, tacitly urging Madison to do the same. She slowly loosens up, but retains a self-consciousness that’s sweet and appealing. But maybe that’s not what McGinley wants? Maybe there’s not enough id here? I can’t tell.

McGinley’s career as a photographer in the art world has taken on a folkloric quality in the minds of young artists and those prone to self-identify as tastemakers. His early work—including the majority of what was shown at the Whitney, when, at 25, he became the youngest artist in thirty years with a solo show—was documentary, pictures he now refers to as evidence of fun. There are black eyes, bloody noses, obviously stoned girls, tattooed guys lying supine on linoleum floors, naked friends piled into a bathtub, wet hair plastered to one another. He was often compared to Larry Clark (the seeming exploitation) and Nan Goldin (the glamorized substance abuse).

Photo: Courtesy of Ryan McGinley Studios

His photographs of the past ten years, however, are more ambitious, more formally complex, and more expensive to produce—if just as suspiciously savvy. They’re the result of studio shoots like this one or, more often, of costly and complicated road trips across America. The models spelunk in Technicolor caves, do flips off barn roofs, trudge through mud, run through felds with sparklers, climb waterfalls, hang from trees, zip-line, play tag, and leapfrog over one another.