Josh McNey is a young photographer from California who lives and works in New York City. His photography is the type that makes our knees go weak — and ask for an urgent interview.

What was the first photograph that you remember making an impression on you?
My mom has at least two huge trunks of family photos. Taking family photos was a big part of my experience growing up as was taking pictures of my brothers when they were skating and surfing. My parents also kept a large collection of photo books, most of them reportage work. A book of photos of US Marines by Anthony Edgeworth idealized a sort of masculinity that I found and still find very attractive. On the most basic level, those photos certainly influenced my decision to ultimately join the US Marines.

Can you describe the first photograph you took that made you — or someone else — think that you might have a calling as a photographer?
When I was still in high school, I drove with a friend to West Hollywood and spent a day trying to take pictures of homeless kids. My assumptions and my approach couldn’t have been more naive. I thought that I would take pictures of strangers the way you take pictures of an animal in a zoo. It was a big wakeup. I ended up spending a really strange but eye-opening afternoon with a young hustler who introduced himself to me as ‘Fra Diavolo’. I took maybe 10 photos of him but never printed any of them. I came home from that trip and in “after school special style” I told my mom I had decided to become a photographer.

Which photographers influence you most?
Walter Pfeiffer, Nobuyoshi Araki and Wolfgang Tillmans. Eakins, Cartier-Bresson and Muybridge. A lot of painters and filmmakers, too.

Where do you find your models?
Family, friends, lovers and strangers. Some people I’ve been photographing for years. With others, it can be a brief encounter — even just one picture.

Define the word “beauty”.
I think beauty is integral to how I experience the world. To some extent, I’ve chosen photography as my primary medium for expressing that experience; I don’t know that I could describe it more accurately with words. It clearly means different things to different people. I do think that my own experience of sensing beauty is a probably a soup of different emotions at the same time — desire, trust, aspiration and others.

What can you tell us about wrestlers?
The wrestlers have a fraternal bond. The teams are inseparable. Because it’s a form of fighting, wrestling legitimizes a kind of physical intimacy that would otherwise be stigmatized as too homosexual. Pinning another man to the ground for sexual gratification is queer. Pinning another man to the ground for points is a sport. Physically, the performance is identical but the context of sport affords these guys the opportunity to embrace and be physical without it being overtly sexualized. I’ve seen the YouTube ‘wrestler boner’ videos but I just don’t buy it. In my experience — and I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few years with wrestlers — these guys really are playing to win.

Hit the gallery for more wrestlers in all their high definiton glory, and come by next week for Part II of our exclusive interview with Josh McNey.

Josh McNey