Light, space and time. Those are the classic ingredients for photography, which have been reinvented, rediscovered and rearranged again and again for almost 200 years. And just when you thought that the subject might have exhausted itself, that nothing new could be done, someone comes along and interprets them in a way that hasn’t been seen before, not quite like that. As it happens, this latest someone is called Ryan McGinley.

Ryan McGinley’s steep ascent within the world of photography appears almost as effortless as his images: Born in 1977 in New Jersey, he moved to New York in 1996 to study graphic design at Parsons School of Design, where almost by accident he discovered his love for photography. Incessantly shooting his friends and surroundings, McGinley inadvertently documented the microcosm of youth culture in New York at the turn of the millennium in a body of work that stood out for its energy and optimism, despite the grit and rawness of the images — a style that should later draw comparisons to the work of Nan Goldin, Larry Clark and Robert Frank. In the meantime, McGinley befriended a group of local artists and creative types — among them his close friends Dan Colen and the late Dash Snow — that would soon be hyped as a ‘new movement’ by the press, a label based more on the excessive lifestyle the three had in common than their actual and quite disparate work.

And so for the past ten years, McGinley has continuously been one step ahead, and is already taking the next corner of his young career — like the teenagers in his images, like youth itself, always on the run, always looking for the next thing, but always with the unmistakable energy and optimism and lightness that ultimately characterizes all of his work. Because no one these days sculpts light, space and time quite in the same way as Ryan McGinley.

Ein Magazin über Orte (A magazine about places) is published twice a year. It deals with a different location in every issue. The magazine collects works of various authors in the form of photographs, drawings and texts.

Sandy Kim utilizes a highly self-referential style of photography which peers into the tiny microcosm of one woman’s life. Reminiscent of the casual documentary style popularized by Nan Goldin in the Eighties, the photographs in Sandy Kim highlight her life at one particular moment and the people who are revolving in and around it.

—Jesse Pollock

Sandy Kim is pretty short, has a ton of hair, a broken orange backpack and always loses her camera. When that happens, she just gets a disposable and keeps taking pictures. It’s this lackadaisical tenacity that translates into her photos, how they always looked kind of busted but warmly worn in and comfortable. Like many young photographers, she’s made her friends her subjects — landscapes of young women, tattoos and San Francisco fog. But she never lays a soft hand, as if anything flattering in her photos is accidental. That’s not to say her photos are purposefully unappealing or harsh, but simply that they are so often just really gross — honest portraits of much of her daily life. But Sandy’s grossness is completely malleable, sometimes funny, sometimes horrific, sometimes unbelievably lush. Sandy is such a brazen and unafraid woman and that power continually streams strongly in her photos, across all spectrums of feeling and subject. Throughout Sandy Kim, there is a lot of blood, but that blood is never the same — blood on her sheets after sex, blood from a dead body covered in a sterile white sheet, blood on the hand of a friend after an unknown accident. He’s smiling, looking straight at the camera, at Sandy. They both know it will heal.

—Matthew Schnipper