From TEAM gallery, about McGinley's "Grids":

This exhibition consists of three huge grids of individual portraits
of fans at concerts. Over the past four years, Ryan McGinley has
photographed faces in the crowd at a number of large outdoor music
festivals across the United States and in Europe. These recurring
events run for two or three days and feature a relatively wide variety
of artists. McGinley and the members of his crew — each of whom has
been given explicit instruction — spend their days from noon until
well past midnight attending performances, shooting the fans from
myriad vantage points, afterwards camping overnight on the
fairgrounds. In this way, they become deeply involved observers, both
physically and emotionally immersed in the throng while still
maintaining a certain sense of removal. The resulting images show
ecstatic faces awash with colored light, each larger than life size.

Many of the pictures are dominated by a single color, a result not of
post-production editing but rather the stages’ differently colored
lights. The vivid tones further the individual images’ strong
emotional tenors, earnest and heart-felt, but never melodramatic. The
calculated arrangement of the photographs allows the colors to
interact with each other, leading the viewer’s eye up, down, and
across the grids which sometimes stretch across as much as twenty five
feet of space. It might be possible to view and appreciate these works
as color studies, were it not for the emphatic vivacity of their
subjects. When these photos are produced and arranged as such, the
effect is of a youthful sublime.

Grids displays McGinley’s own significant relationship to rock,
specifically the experience of live music. His subjects are visibly
entranced by the performances of their favorite bands, looking beyond
the camera toward the stage, oftentimes altogether unaware of the
artist. In most of the pictures, the face occupies the bulk of the
photo’s frame. Though similar in their intensity, their individual
expressions convey a wide variety of emotions, ranging from blissful
to darkly contemplative. McGinley’s own fandom is apparent: he has no
doubt found himself in such states of rapture. Since early
adolescence, he has been very actively involved in the rituals of
popular culture, chief among them the community forming at the core of
concert attendance. The grids, all titled You and my Friends, speak to
this sense of momentary collective friendship, absorbing and enfolding
the viewer into the artist’s own constructed audience.

These works build upon McGinley’s repetoire of concert photography,
which began with Irregular Regulars, his first show at Team in 2007.
For that exhibition, he followed the musician Morrissey as he toured
the United States, the U.K., and Mexico. With the grids, he continues
to experiment with the genre of rock photography. Adopting a rigorous
working practice, one which allows for tremendous subtlety, McGinley
turns the viewer’s attention away from the performer altogether and
directly and exclusively toward the fans. The artist cites, as
inspiration for this shift, the depiction of concertgoers in the 1958
documentary Jazz on a Summer’s Day.