However, McConnell also had a taste for mischief and says that at about the same time he discovered photography, he had his first experience with ecstasy. “I’ve got my cliché story – went to a rave, took an E, danced all night, hugged everyone, walked home with the birds singing. I went upstairs, got all my old music and put it under the bed, because I knew I wasn’t going to need it any more.”
The experience helped persuade him to study photography at UCA Farnham, he adds. “I’d done my research, I’d read The Face, I’d read Mixmag and i-D, and I thought I was going to land into this massive rave-up,” he laughs. “Instead, I ended up on the fucking commuter belt, aged 20, in some shared house with some girl who didn’t even smoke. I lasted about three days in that house.”
But the course “was really fucking amazing, a life-changing experience without a shadow of a doubt”, and when he discovered Larry Clark’s series Tulsa, it had a similar effect. “I mean, it’s phenomenal, isn’t it?” he says. “It’s all there, the layout and those words at the start, ‘once the needle goes in it never comes out’. There’s a deeply romantic aspect to it that’s been so plagiarised over the years, but for me it represented the absolute futility of doing another black-and-white series of people shooting up.”
McConnell went on to study on the prestigious photography MA at the Royal College of Art, but between the two “just mooched about a bit”, going a little off the rails in the process. “It’s weird talking about it because it’s so wrong, a lot of it,” he says. “I’ve had a massive drug history, and basically coming out of college I was running around for a year, through rehab and all the rest of it. But then I came through and got stuck into loads of work.”
While at Farnham he’d shot a few album covers for Universal and Island, but “it was only in the 1990s that I began to see the potential of being involved in the art world, and that was more what I was interested in achieving than photographing for a magazine, or photographing advertising”.
Then, in 2004, his work was published in the Photoworks Monographs series (in collaboration with Steidl) and suddenly, he recalls, The New York Times was on the phone and he got picked up by Art + Commerce, one of the world’s leading photography agents. “From then on commissioned work became a different thing,” says McConnell. “I realised that it was a way in which you could see the world and meet people in situations you wouldn’t be in, in any other circumstances. So I engaged with that for a while… I flew around the world a bit, I thought I was going to have a big trajectory of money and fame. I was sadly mistaken, unfortunately!”
