Sex, Drugs & Magick (book two) (signed)

Gareth McConnell
Sex, Drugs & Magick (book two) (signed)

Photographs: Gareth McConnell

Publisher: Sorika

152 pages

Year: 2014

ISBN: 9780957557345

Comments: Illustrated soft cover,30 × 24 cm, BW duotone, offset on Fedrigoni arcoprint milk paper. Edition of 523, signed by the photographer

In this new photographic art book 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.