Life Adjustment Center

Life Adjustment Center pairs two strands of Ryan McGinley's work from the same period: staged black-and-white nude studio portraits, often shared with live animals, set against the loose, saturated color photographs he made travelling with friends across the American landscape.

The first sequence, drawn from the series Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, stages models nude in the studio alongside wild animals, extending McGinley's long interest in the vulnerability and theater of the unclothed body. The second returns to the open-road photography that made his name in the early 2000s — bodies in motion, campfires, water, and light, shot on the move rather than staged. Dashwood Books published the hardcover in blue cloth boards with red stamped titling in November 2010, alongside a signed, numbered edition of 100 copies.

McGinley (b. 1977) became, at twenty-five, the youngest artist to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum, built on exactly this territory: youth, nudity, and motion photographed with the immediacy of a snapshot and the ambition of a tableau. Life Adjustment Center sits between his early road-trip books and his later animal and studio work, showing the two strands developing side by side.