Close Your Eyes also includes found images, mostly on the subject of the Zen mystic, Osho, whose followers were among the first to bring the drug ecstasy to Ibiza, but also showing moments in British history when civil liberties were being threatened. The accompanying essay by author Niall Griffiths itemises Section 63 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 – detailing powers to remove anyone attending or preparing for a rave, which was legally defined as “sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats”. But there are also references to the Poll Tax Riots and “the repetitive beat of truncheons against human skulls”.
“I’d say I’m a very fucking angry person – it’s impossible not to be engaged on some level because there’s so much to be angry about,” he explains. “The noose has been tightening down the years, and we find ourselves in this diabolical position… you know, where civil liberties have been eroded.”
I wonder if part of this comes from growing up in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and ’80s – a time and place riven by political issues. “My understanding of what was going on was so limited – as it was for many people,” he answers. “Certainly, I didn’t have it as bad as a lot of others, but The Troubles still surround you. It wasn’t until about six or seven years after I’d left that I realised Northern Ireland was a huge sectarian theme park.”
Born in 1972, McConnell grew up with his elder sister in Carrickfergus, Country Antrim. He first encountered photography while at grammar school, when his mother enrolled in a local camera club. “She came back one day with these pictures of guitars shaped like AK-47s – it turned out she was in the same class as Henry Cluney, who was in this Northern Irish punk band called Stiff Little Fingers I was obsessed with,” says McConnell. “It gave me the urge to do something creative, and I was useless at playing the guitar so photography carried on from there. And then I was really fortunate – I met [photographer and professor] Paul Seawright, and that got me really into it.”
Seawright wasn’t much older than him and the two made a connection. “He told me to go up to the library and look at these back issues of Creative Camera,” recalls McConnell. “It completely blew my mind. Mostly because there were a lot of people in the magazines from Northern Ireland – because of everything that’s gone on there, anybody who grows up there generally thinks it’s completely shit.”
His parents, who ran a store together, were wholly supportive – McConnell’s father recently telling his son, “It was just so out of the blue,” because no one else in the family had ever done anything like it. “This was the era when people were joining paramilitary organisations, getting up to all sorts of stuff, and I think they were just relieved.”
