Ryan McGinley celebrates his community for the fifth issue of RIMOWA’s resurrected publication, Der Eigene.

DESIGN | June 25, 2026

Ryan McGinley celebrates his community for the fifth issue of RIMOWA’s resurrected publication, Der Eigene.

RIMOWA is dedicated to exploring what movement makes possible, not simply as transit, but as a way of reshaping how we see ourselves and encounter one another.

RIMOWA proudly expresses this sentiment by adding a fifth issue to their ongoing reactivation of the historical queer publication Der Eigene, first founded in Germany in 1896. “Der Eigene” has no direct English translation -- its meaning evokes ideas of self-possession, individuality and acceptance. Since 2022, RIMOWA releases a new issue each year during Pride Month.

After collaborating with photographer Collier Schorr in 2025 on the fourth edition, this year RIMOWA invites photographer Ryan McGinley to capture his community -- giving the artist creative freedom to revere and reveal the important, singular people who populate his life as a queer artist living and working in New York City.

The foreword to the issue describes McGinley’s work in the following terms:

McGinley’s photographs are concerned with how people move through the world, how they find themselves, and how they find each other. For McGinley, movement is part of the method. It’s a way of loosening the structures that ordinarily fix identity in place, to create the conditions for intimacy and connection. His pictures show what happens when people are allowed to meet each other, simply, just as they are.

On stoops, fire escapes, rooftops or stairwells, the subjects in Der Eigene by RIMOWA are captured in states of heightened presence. To be photographed by McGinley is to be witnessed and to be chosen, folded into the wide-ranging family that sits at the centre of his life’s work.

McGinley describes the project as a living network of collaboration and care. “I’m trying to learn from these artists. My camera is the tool that gets me to do just that, and in some ways this project feels connected to the history of Der Eigene. It was one of the first queer publications to centre identity, art, and self-expression as part of everyday life by documenting queer people as just that, people.”

The publication features photographs and Polaroid portraits taken by McGinley that are accompanied by personal texts from each subject:

TEVIN EVANS

LUISA OPALESKY

STUART PERKINS

ASH RUCKER

BOBBY BROWN

CEYENNE DOROSHOW

CHARLES CAESAR

MARC HUNDLEY

MAX DONAHUE

JARI JONES

ROSS COLLAB