Ryan McGinley, Bethesda Water Fountain, Central Park
, 2026. Photo: Ryan McGinley Ryan McGinley spent an excellent piece of in 2015 photographing friends on the graveyard shift. In late August, he was in Central Park around midnight as 3 of his subjects removed naked and splashed in Bethesda Water fountain. As McGinley snapped away with a long lens, his strobe illuminating the fountain, a man emerged with a violin. “It was so beautiful,” states McGinley. “New Yorkers do not bat an eye. They resemble, ‘Another day in New York. Let me simply keep playing my music.'”
A photo from that evening is part of a body of work on view at Jeffrey Deitch’s Wooster Street gallery beginning June 13. “Graveyard shift,” which depicts naked figures roughhousing peaceful streets like they’re in the world’s biggest, emptiest play ground, is McGinley’s first solo show in town considering that 2018: “The city really seemed like it was ours.”
The exhibit recalls the images that made McGinley famous back in the early aughts, when he documented the hedonistic life of buddies like Dash Snow and Kunle Martins. His visual journal of this darkly glamorous subculture led to an intriguing solo exhibition at the Whitney in 2003, when McGinley was just 25. For over a decade, he crisscrossed the country, producing a well-known series of images including lithe naked models jumping and dancing through the wilderness. “Night Shift” is a homecoming. “We covered all 5 districts,” he states. “Even Staten Island.”
McGinley and his models shot Sunday through Tuesday from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m., the sort of hours that are now uncommon for the 48-year-old. “It’s so hard, particularly if you’re refraining from doing it consistently,” he says. The schedule was required to avoid encountering trouble. They only had one close call with the cops, shooting outside a cars and truck wash on the West Side Highway. “They got on their speaker and were like, ‘You call this art?'” McGinley states.
Hudson River, Manhattan, 2026.
Long Island City Train Yard, Queens, 2026.
Lincoln Center, Manhattan, 2026.
West Side Highway, Manhattan, 2026.
Photos by Ryan McGinley
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