He began taking Polaroids of his peers – “bombing” buildings with cryptic tags, making out, getting high; in short, celebrating life. Pasting the images up on the walls of his East Village apartment, he soon realised he was capturing a particular moment in time: post AIDS, on the cusp of a new millennium with the thrill and uncertainty of a prophesied Y2K armageddon. So he gathered the photos into a handmade book titled The Kids Were Alright, effectively a collective portrait of a generation.

“I feel like my generation was sort of the light after the darkness,” he says.

The book fell into the hands of curator and scholar Sylvia Wolf, who arranged McGinley a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, a very uptown institution. It was 2003 and he was 25, the youngest photographer to have a solo show at the august institution.

Such was the critical acclaim that McGinley was named Photographer of the Year by American Photo Magazine; awarded the Young Photographer Infinity Award by the International Centre for Photography (2007); and honoured at the Guggenheim’s Young Collectors Ball in 2009.

In 2014, GQ declared McGinley “the most important artist in America”.

How did he feel?

“I don’t overthink things, so while I definitely enjoyed the recognition I don’t believe it changed the way I photograph or the way I behave.”

It did make him feel like spreading his wings beyond downtown New York, though. “Not through any kind of rejection, it just felt time to point my camera somewhere else.”

Fortuitously, a friend had bought a country house and offered it to McGinley for extended visits. He began inviting friends, installed a trampoline, made bonfires. They’d get naked and frolic, incarnating a kind of Rousseau-esque back-to-nature bacchanal.

Famously, Kate Moss would pose in such a setting for a W magazine fashion spread in 2003.

Then, another pivot – this time into a studio back in New York to begin a decade-long (2009–2019) project called Yearbook, now installed at the Shepparton Art Museum as part of the PHOTO 2024 festival.

“It’s a continuation of my fascination with youth subcultures but also a personal challenge to find my voice in studio since I’m not a technical photographer.”

But find his voice McGinley does: even though the subjects are stripped of identifying signs of occupation or social standing. Shot on candy-coloured backgrounds and collaged the length and height of the gallery’s walls, the installation offers a kaleidoscopic immersion into what McGinley describes as “a web of friends and friends of friends that binds us all together”.

“Ryan is an important artist who for the last couple of decades has been at the forefront of documenting and celebrating youth culture,” says PHOTO 2024 founder and creative director Elias Redstone. “He uniquely blurs the lines between queerness, pop culture, skateboarding, music and fashion. Through his work he has changed the landscape of photography.”

McGinley’s latest work, a series of more than a dozen images of Australian singer Troye Sivan, is on show as a separate installation.

“These photos capture a free-spirited nature in Troye’s energy,” says McGinley. “They offer a closeness to him that isn’t so commercial. It’s more stripped down and intimate versus the done-up nature of pop stardom.”

McGinley will be in Melbourne to give a keynote at the PHOTO 2024 Ideas Summit, speaking about his creative process, his rapid rise to fame and his grounding in community. After which he intends to head to Hanging Rock, the location of Peter Weir’s 1974 classic, Picnic at Hanging Rock.

“It’s one of my all-time favourite films, and I am hoping to shoot some new work there,” he says.