Ryan McGinley – Night Shift

As children, we’re convinced the night belongs to magic. It’s the only logical explanation. Santa Claus somehow visits every house in the world before sunrise. The Tooth Fairy clocks in for her shift. And, somewhere, someone hangs the dew on every blade of grass before morning arrives. We sleep through it all, that’s the deal. Magic only works when nobody’s looking.

Growing up rewrites the fairy tale. For some, the night means fear. For others, it’s the only time the world feels honest. The city stops obeying the rules of daylight. New York’s traffic lights continue changing for no one, steam keeps rising from the manholes and the garbage trucks drift through empty avenues while neon signs flicker with the stubbornness of a teenager refusing to go home. Freedom in its natural habitat. After eight years away from New York, McGinley returns with a body of work devoted to that fragile ecosystem. Photographing people being people has a kind of voyeuristic kink to it, especially when they’re naked. Yet the nudity in Night Shift doesn’t read as sexual, but rather as a symbiosis between the body and the city, the person and the soul. Once the uniform of the day disappears, clothes, status, identity, all the things that organise our daylight selves, life becomes momentarily suspended.

Photographed during an inverted nine-to-five, the series travels through all five boroughs using long exposures and radio flash, making bodies move through realities that seem to be forming in real time. Every image exists in the uncanny space of dream-walking, where reality and fantasy are impossible to separate. Through his own version of staffage, the human figure is both monumental and insignificant at once. Tiny against the overwhelming scale of the city, yet somehow magnificent in its anonymity.

At Brooklyn Piers, a body sits alone facing the river while the distant soundtrack of garbage trucks and late-night conversations of partygoers drifts through the air. Another sprints past Coney Island’s Cyclone as though someone has just delivered the best news of her life, while on Pitt Street, a figure crouches over a subway vent, engulfed in rising steam, as if the city itself were washing away every version of themselves they had to perform during the day.

We, the viewers, feel captivated by the almost adolescent joy running through them, by the trails of light that make everything seem to vanish even as it unfolds. But it’s impossible to remain a mere observer. Before long, you find yourself exhilarated, running alongside those bodies, feeling the cold spray of a sprinkler in the South Bronx or the wind cutting across the Williamsburg Bridge at four in the morning. All while wondering what it is that creeps out when you stay past your bedtime.