The Kids Were Alright

These are photos from the fucked-up party days, from when Ryan first started taking pictures of all his crazy friends up to when he had his solo show at the Whitney Museum, which flung him like a wet young noodle into the boiling pot of the art world.

To dig these up, Ryan had to pore through his archives—hundreds and hundreds of black binders lining the shelves of his studio from floor to ceiling. “I was so psychotically obsessed with documenting my life,” he said. “All I wanted to do was make pictures of anything and everything. One of my favorite things to do back then would be to go out and get completely demolished and take tons of photos. Then I’d get the film developed and they were like evidence of whatever I had done that night because I usually couldn’t remember any of it.” SELF-PORTRAIT (CAR ACCIDENT), 1998

DONALD AND EARSNOT, 2003
It was a crazy summer for Earsnot. He was just starting his five-year probation (which recently ended in March!) and he got run over by a truck while skating on Delancey and Orchard. He was in the hospital for four weeks before he could have surgery, and then he was stuck at home for another four weeks healing. I needed to get him out of the city so we went up to a collector of mine’s chateau in Brattleboro, Vermont. Snot was so bummed he was missing Gay Pride Weekend in the city and kept yelling at me. That’s Donald Eric Cumming sitting next to him. I had been doing a trampoline series that summer and in this photo they were watching Leo Fitzpatrick do flips while drinking beer at the same time.

DAN (9/11), 2001
This is the artist Dan Colen on the night of 9/11. We rode our bikes down to see if we could help out. The streets were covered in dust. The fire department had just started flooding the streets. I remember finding bits of papers and documents scattered around. The truck in the background explains it all. That’s how everything looked. I remember seeing huge stacks of Poland Spring bottled water for the soldiers that had set up base down there. It was all so bizarre. If you lived downtown you could smell the dust for a few weeks afterward.

DASH (DELIVERY), 2002
This is a typical night in 2002 for me. Dash Snow on the horn with our dealer. The couch he’s sitting on used to belong to me and my roommate Teddy. We gave it to him as a housewarming gift when he moved to Avenue C with his then wife, Agathe Snow, a bunny named Gary, and a parakeet named Sergeant Slaughter. The couch was rumored to have a missing bag of blow lost in it. One night we tore it up like archaeologists looking for a precious artifact. We never found it. A few years later Dash planted a tree in the hole we dug out of it and sold it as a sculpture to Charles Saatchi.

OLIVER (3-D GLASSES), 2002
SEMEN SPERMS, 2001
ERIC (SALVATION ARMY), 2001
SPARKY, 1999
RYAN (HEAD-BUTT), 1999
MARIANA (BATHROOM), 1998