Ryan McGinley and Quil Lemons on the power of the nude

This story is taken from the autumn 2026 issue of Dazed. Order a copy of the magazine here.

This conversation took place not long after Quil Lemons married stylist Parker Harwood in New York, in June this year. Their wedding photographs, published in the New York Times, were taken by Ryan McGinley, who also served as witness to the union. They made a handsome couple. 

McGinley and Lemons’ relationship goes back to the late 2010s, when Lemons first worked with McGinley and became part of the school of future photographers who passed through his studio – like Petra Collins, Tyler Mitchell and Nick Sethi, among others. Boss and assistant became mentor and protege, then peers, then friends and even, on occasion, muses to one another. 

McGinley has been photographing downtown Manhattan and the people who inhabit it since the late 1990s: waifs, strays, artists, musicians, skaters, friends and lovers. Among many landmark achievements, at the age of 25 McGinley became the youngest artist in three decades  to receive a solo show at the Whitney. The road trips, open landscapes  and nude bodies followed, but the method remained much the same: to gather your people, build a world and photograph it. 

Born in South Philadelphia in 1997, Lemons came to photography through Tumblr and fashion, then began experimenting, testing what images of Black masculinity, queer desire and the self were permitted to look like. Aged 23, he broke a record of his own, becoming the youngest photographer to shoot a Vanity Fair cover. 

Following McGinley’s first New York show in eight years, Night Shift, and ahead of Quil Lemons’ new photobook Quiladelphia, the pair come together for a wide-ranging discussion touching on Instagram censorship, Catholicism, Nan Goldin, Twitter porn and what a free body in America might look like in 2026. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there are some dick jokes too.

Ryan McGinley: Before we start, I want to thank you for writing to the head of Instagram, Adam [Mosseri], when I got kicked off the app. Lots of people say, ‘I got you, bro’, but you actually came to bat for me, reminding him that Instagram is a platform for creators and saying it wasn’t right. It meant a lot. 

Quil Lemons: It’s the scarier side of visibility, when you’re doing everything right and can still be completely erased from an entire platform. If they can knock you off Instagram, then who’s to say they won’t get rid of every photographer who doesn’t fit an agenda that the government, Instagram or any app is pushing? We are starting to lose freedom of speech. If your rights are on the chopping block, then mine are too. 

Ryan McGinley: I knew my gay mafia, our queer gang, would look out for me. 

Quil Lemons: I want to start with Nan Goldin, who described her photography as “the sublimation of sex, a means of seduction, and a way to remain a crucial part of my subjects’ lives. A chance to touch someone with a camera rather than physically.” What’s your response to that? 

“Owning my body in a queer sense was the first entrance into nudity. This is part of queer history – to have ownership over my queer body. It felt exciting, dangerous and political. I always go back to the nude body” – Ryan McGinley

Ryan McGinley: Sublimation is taking something difficult in life and turning it into something beautiful. My brother Michael passed away from Aids in the mid-1990s. It was a moment when I felt that innocence was lost. He was an artist too. He was this beautiful gay guy who had a partner and many gay friends, and within three years they were all dead. I was a teenager. I saw that happen and I was like, ‘Wow, nothing is given in life. People can just disappear. [So] I’m going to use my creativity and art  to sublimate this idea of living.’ I was just coming out, so I was figuring out being young and queer. Through this process, I could sort of live for him. 

Quil Lemons: I use sublimation when making a fine-art image and in thinking  about my imagery in that way. Being a Black gay man in America is so much. The hypersexuality, the hypermasculinity – everything is hyper, and that all comes from slavery and labour. The Black body has always been used as a tool. How do I make images in response to that much weight? Is it the colour brown or the skin tone? I wanted to bring some of the brown into some of my images, not every image. I do want to give traditional black and white, but I want to give brown, black and white. Your photographs have long presented the body as a vehicle for freedom. Do you still believe the body can function as a site of liberation? 

Ryan McGinley: For me, liberation is rebellion. I’ve always been drawn towards rebellion in my work. If you give me a set of rules, I will immediately break them. It’s been my personality from the beginning. Within photography, we’re making art, doing activism, we’re on the streets, taking up space. To be able to lens that and amplify it feels like I am contributing to liberation. 

Quil Lemons: We share that. I feel like a whole school has come through your studio. The graduating class of Ryan McGinley’s team. 

Ryan McGinley: I don’t ever think about my studio as a school because I don’t think of myself as a teacher. But I like to have people around me who can help me figure it out as I create. I rely on them as much as they rely on me. There isn’t a curriculum, but somehow it works. Thinking about your generation, I’ve had Tyler Mitchell and Luisa Opalesky. Just the other day, I was at MoMA PS1 and saw Farah Al Qasimi’s work. She was at Tate just a few months ago in London, and I was just like, ‘Damn, Farah came out of my  studio.’ Steph Mitchell, Nick Sethi, Chad Moore. Petra Collins was a model on one of my cross-country trips. She was saying to me recently that she learned just as much from being a model in front of my camera as [from] my assistants behind the camera. People wear so many hats on my road trips. 

Quil Lemons: That was the first time I saw an image of Petra. It’s fun to see what her world has become. How has your work grown? You said the energy has changed with this new body of work, so I want to know if it reminded you of any version of your younger self. 

Ryan McGinley: Definitely. Someone who is a fan of mine could see the last 20 years of my work in my new Night Shift series. You can see the skating and graffiti energy, the griminess of New York, the sort of… 

Quil Lemons: McGinleyisms. 

Ryan McGinley: I guess. The motion of the road trips and the nude bodies.

Quil Lemons: When I look at this new body of work, I feel a deeper sense of love and romanticism instead of that more punk energy. 

Ryan McGinley: Do you feel like you’re a punk? 

Quil Lemons: For my whole life. I feel like that’s how we’re here. It’s the same sensibility and understanding that this camera is a tool – a way to share my journey, but also the journeys of everyone I admire, look up to and surround myself with. When did you begin photographing nude subjects? What did nudity allow you to express that clothing couldn’t, and how has your relationship to nudity changed over the years? 

Ryan McGinley: I grew up religious, a hardcore Roman Catholic. My mom was ‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus’ and I went to church every day. I have ADHD and I was in church, squirming in the pews and losing my mind. My mom realised the Bible wasn’t sinking in and I was an artist, so she decided, ‘I’m going to fill this kid with Catholic art.’ I was really young, maybe seven or eight years old, and she  started to show me Renaissance paintings by Michelangelo and Da Vinci. I was looking at pictures of the Sistine Chapel, the nude bodies floating, and all the really dark Caravaggio paintings with death and nudity. That was my entrance into the body in art. When I first started taking photographs, I was exploring my sexuality. My brother had just died, and I was coming out. I took photos of me and my boyfriend at the time, nude in bed, and put them on the gallery wall. Owning my body in a queer sense was the first entrance into nudity. This is part of queer history – to have ownership over my queer body. It felt exciting, dangerous and political. I always go back to the nude body. 

Quil Lemons: Shooting nude with you is like a New York rite of passage; it’s a real cultural stamp. It was an honour to be part of it. I was a little nervous. 

Ryan McGinley: I think everyone is. We try to have the best movement director, set designer and lighting director, but there are a lot of people on set. 

Quil Lemons: You’re naked in front of like, ten people. But then there’s a  moment when it switches and it’s like, ‘I need my grandkids to know I was sexy.’ 

“Shooting nude with Ryan is a New York rite of passage... I was a little nervous. But then there’s a moment when it switches and it’s like, ‘I need my grandkids to know I was sexy’” – Quil Lemons

Ryan McGinley: But what about you? You photograph so many people nude, and you’re showing a lot of body parts. What’s your approach? 

Quil Lemons: I treat everything like a character study. I wish I was a painter.  I wish I had more time to paint. A photo was always a quicker way to get to a painting. I got compared to Mapplethorpe for shooting people in an erotic way, but I wanted to make something that felt more true to how Black gays communicate our sexuality with each other. Mapplethorpe was close, but I felt I had to be a  little punchier and more raunchy. At the same time, I had to be submissive and very controlled. Because Mapplethorpe wanted to show a hard dick, and I was like, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun to subvert that and show something flaccid?’ Everyone always shows a big, Black cock. But have you ever seen a Black dick soft? I called it Gummy Worm because I thought it was really funny. Posing was so important. I was shooting a lot of boys from  OnlyFans. What I saw happening there was a different version of the queer communication of arousal. It was clearly masculine, but there was a more nuanced understanding of what the masc body could be in a queer context. I wanted to make it a bit femme and take references from how they were posing online. It was fun to bring that into the white cube and celebrate what they offer to the queer community. Because everyone jerks off. Everyone’s on OnlyFans. I cannot escape it on Twitter. [OnlyFans] revolutionised porn and made it safer. So it was fun to honour and contextualise [that]. 

Ryan McGinley: I’m looking forward to seeing you develop as an artist and I’m so excited for more Quil imagery. I think we did good, right? 

Quil Lemons: Thank you. We did good. 

Quiladelphia will be published by IDEA in October