McGinley is a photographer who takes snaps of young hipsters having sex and doing drugs, and makes uptown collectors feel "with it."

McGinley grew up in a working class family in suburban New Jersey and spent his teenage years as a skate punk in Washington Square Park. In the early 1990s, he was photographed by director Larry Clark, who was looking for amateur actors to cast in Kids. Clark ended up choosing McGinley's pal Leo Fitzpatrick, but the photographer's grittily hypersexual pictures of wayward teens proved a major influence when McGinley picked up a camera himself and started documenting, vérité style, the hedonism of his pretty young friends, such as now deceased art star Dash Snow, whom McGinley met when Snow was living in Alphabet City as a 16-year-old member of the Irak graffiti crew. In 1999, as a 21-year-old Parsons student, McGinley sent out his homemade photography book The Kids are Alright—featuring his Lower East Side posse doing drugs, throwing up, tagging buildings, shoplifting, and having sex—to 100 magazine editors and artists, and Index immediately dispatched him to Berlin to photograph the musician Momus. Commissions from Vice inevitably followed, and in 2002, at 24, McGinley became the youngest person ever to have a solo show at the Whitney. A year later, his photos were exhibited at P.S. 1. McGinley has since worked for a handful of other magazines as well as for advertisers like Nike, Puma, and Verizon.

While McGinley's shtick, like Nan Goldin's before him, is that his faux-spontaneous photos provide an unmediated glimpse into a downtown bohemia edgier than anything you've experienced first-hand, there's never been anything spontaneous about his success, which he's pursued with relentless and calculating ambition (indeed, his knack for schmoozing and self-promotion might be all that truly distinguishes him from the YouTube/MySpace multitudes offering up exhibitionistic visual diaries of their rebellious lives). [Image via Getty]