Those Brad Pitt Photos Aren't Just Meme-Worthy, They're Kind Of Radical

Photographer Ryan McGinley is known for his electric lo-fi images of ecstatic youth, often revolving around naked 20-somethings galavanting through the wilderness lighting sparklers, jumping into waterfalls, and just generally looking young and wild and free.

His most recent series, however, features a very different subject: LA dad on a juice cleanse Brad Pitt , who is 53 years old and rebuilding his life following a public, ugly divorce from Angelina Jolie.

The spread appears in GQ Styles Summer issue , along with an interview by Michael Paterniti about Pitts life since his split from Jolie in September. The photographs are set in three national parks: the Floridian swamps of the Everglades, the crystalline dunes at White Sands and the crepuscular caves of Carlsbad Caverns, the latter of which are both in New Mexico.

Since the photos appeared online this morning, the internet has banded together to revel in the strange yet undeniably magnetic images, which feature one of Hollywoods most iconic leading men rolling around like a sad baby deer in a seemingly endless carpet of sand. Many were quick to comment on the resemblance between the pics and Terrence Malicks films especially The Tree of Life.

But there is something additionally compelling about the series, something we rarely see in the traditional celebrity spread.

Brad Pitt never left the Tree of Life set. pic.twitter.com/0idnQTfBWG

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Brad Pitt never left the Tree of Life set. pic.twitter.com/0idnQTfBWG
Matt Jacobs (@tarantallegra) May 3, 2017

Overall, Pitts interview with Paterniti feels genuine, self-aware and open. He discusses the experience of having his family ripped apart, his dependence on alcohol and his shortcomings as a father. Although he rejected the term midlife crisis, Pitt is clearly going through a major life transition, one suffused with both pain and possibility.

McGinleys photos similarly reflect the complexity of this moment. From a certain angle, the artist captures Pitt as aged, gaunt and weary, his tumbling body appearing like a folkloric hermit who, after wandering too long, has finally collapsed. From another angle, however, Pitt appears almost adolescent his frame lanky and awkward, his tattooed body hunting for meaning or any roadsigns he can find. The images present Pitt as changing and imperfect, aging yet with much to learn.

When it comes to celebrity photo spreads, most are sexy, glamorous and aggressively unreal aiming to cultivate envy and desire. Starlets dressed in fantastical gowns lounge impossibly in barnyards, bathtubs and grungy dive bars; makeup artists, hair dressers, designers, photographers and editors all conspire to turn humans into icons, stripping them of their interiority and complexity.

Such spreads also tend to feature young women photographed by men. Of course, publications like GQ tend to focus on male stars, but depict everyone from Leonardo DiCaprio to Adam Driver with the male equivalent qualities of charm, ruggedness and looking cool in a blazer. McGinley and Pitt flip that script a bit.