Gareth McConnell: Sex, Drugs and Magic

In this photographic series Gareth McConnell continues to revisit his photographs of young visitors to Ibiza.

 

A well known series of McConnell’s, which is characterised by a more subtle understanding of his subjects than just the usual ones of sex, drugs and sunny hedonism. McConnell is a highly respected photographer, known for great technical ability. However, in this new book has reworked his studies as defiantly low-tech monochromes, with an exaggerated emphasis on reprographic redundancy, and a pleasure in the failures of vintage reprographic techniques. It’s as much, if not more, about photography and print themselves, as it is about its subjects.

McConnell has always had a poetic sensibility, situated in alignment with acute skills of documentary observation. Here, he transcends documentary orderliness, gathering his images into a darkened, narrative unity, so that they become servants of an ominous, low-lying mood. It’s the disturbed calm of heavy, electrically charged, pre-storm weather, or the ambiguous twilight of the awakening reveller – the reveller who does not know if the birds are singing for morn, or for eve.

DISCOVER MORE STORIES

  1. Ward&Kweskin, Coney Island Kiss

    Ward&Kweskin captures lovers on the boards of Coney Island beach story for Sixteen Volume 11.

  2. Jonas Lindstroem, Kabuki

    Photography by Jonas Lindstroem
    Styling by Victoire Simonney

  3. Joe Lai, House of Horror

    Photography by Joe Lai
    Styling by Victoire Simonney