Rick McGinnis Interview

Four years ago Toronto photographer Rick McGinnis began a modest blog called Some Old Pictures I Took, that turned into an epic exploration into his value, his failings and his purpose. This included posting hundreds of portraits from his thirty year career - many of them great works. The blog took on an autobiographical tone as McGinnis discovered shoots and wrote about the circumstances of his encounters with Hollywood A-listers, musical royalty and other cultural icons.

With Rick having decided to bring the blog to an end, I thought it a great time for a conversation about his career, the interview is published on The Photographic Journal. 

Rick and I started together in the mid-eighties at a monthly music paper in Toronto called Nerve (for whom he also wrote). We were competitors and friends, making our long connection both complex and powerful. We sat down to talk in his backyard in central Toronto.

Here’s an excerpt from the Q & A:

The first time we met, you came to me and said, “I’m Rick McGinnis, I’m moving to New York.” So what was the origin of this big scheme to move to New York?

The kind of photography that I loved, by and large wasn’t being done in London, or any other place, it was being done in New York. Irving Penn was in New York, Avedon was still shooting in New York. If I wanted to be serious, if I wanted to be published in the magazines that I wanted to be published in, I needed to be in New York. So, I always kind of had this plan, and it remained on my mind probably up until the mid-nineties. At one point I sort of took stock of my situation, my life and my state of mind and realized I couldn’t do it.

Why?

I was not mentally able to do it. It took me a while to understand it. The thing I didn’t really know until years later, I was terribly depressed.

For most of the nineties I was very unhappy. I had a bad breakup in a relationship that basically put me on the back foot. I’m not a risk taker by nature, I can’t see myself just selling everything, picking up, reducing my life to a few boxes, and relocating to a city where I know almost nobody. As much as I fantasized about it, and thought maybe I could do that, when I saw you do it, and I saw what you needed to do to do it, I thought, “Oh fuck, I’m not sure if I can do this.”

But you had nothing to lose.

Yeah, technically. But I felt like I had very little, and I had that much to lose. There was at least a certain amount of stability that I could count on having my family nearby, most of my friends, a city that I was familiar with, where I knew where the dangers were, where the dangers weren’t. I thought, “I’ve got that much, I’ve got this much that I’ve managed to accrue in life,” I could lose that, and it terrified me.

You have to understand also my personal situation: I’m adopted, my adopted father died when I was four. That puts you in a situation where you’re prone to fears of rejection and that sort of weird, anonymous, random feeling like, “There’s no reason for me to even be here, another roll of the dice and I wouldn’t exist.” Everything seems very arbitrary, so what little you end up accruing in life, you can call your own. It was suddenly very precious. You’re loath to even risk that because you can see, if you lost that, what the fuck would I have left, really.

Top Image: My portrait of Rick McGinnis, Toronto, 2018

Second Image: Tracy Morgan, by Rick McGinnis, 2005

Third Image: D.M. Thomas, by Rick McGinnis, 1990

Bottom Image: Evan Rachel Wood, by Rick McGinnis, 2007