Gareth McConnell was born in Northern Ireland and now lives and works in London. He’s known for his honest portraiture of social tribes and his colourful still lives, and for the way he revisits and remixes his own archive through collage, layering and re-photography. McConnell has documented the places he’s been and the people he’s been around throughout his career, from the Loyalist community in Belfast to the partygoers of Ibiza.
Most recently McConnell’s released a trilogy of publications that celebrate acid house, ecstasy and rave culture through a reworking of his own archive of portraits from Ibiza in the noughties. Following on from Close Your Eyes and all its vivid colours, his latest two Sex, Drugs & Magick books use cropping, photocopying and re-photocopying to reduce his original C-prints to an intimate, grainy black and white. Taking their name from a text by mystic American writer Robert Anton Wilson about how pleasurable and occult practices can change our perception of reality, both books find new textures in old photographs and aesthetic pleasure in dissonance.
Gareth McConnell is the founder of Sorika, a collaborative publishing project working with artists he admires. His editorial clients include the New York Times, M, le Magazine du Monde, i-D, Dazed, Arena Homme+, AnOther Magazine and Rolling Stone. McConnell’s work has been exhibited worldwide and is included in the Museum of Fine Art in Houston, the British Council Collection and the UBS Art Collection
We Want More explores the role photography and image-production plays in defining music culture today.
Spurred by the advent of digital technologies, both industries have seen a significant change to the channels and processes for ownership and distribution. The traditional frameworks that once upheld a distance between photographers, fans, stars and their labels have collapsed to allow for new routes and territories in which music photography is produced, shared and consumed.
Pauli "The PSM" - Damon Albarn, Jamie XX
(New York, July '14)
© Deirdre O’Callaghan
Courtesy of the artist
Where once many music photographers worked to briefs for specific publications, they are now more in control of context and creative direction. Musicians also play a more active role in their own...