He also started to have misgivings about the ethics of what he was doing, and comments that working commercially was “pretty conflicting”. “The last job I did before the banks came down, I flew to New York to do one portrait of Tommy Hilfiger in his apartment,” he says. “I flew there first class and afterwards I thought, to fly to a city of 50,000 photographers, to have a 15-minute appointment with someone who – I’m not going to go into a big deconstruction of Tommy Hilfiger here, but I’m not a massive fan of a billionaire sweatshop owner. It was just so wrong and so mashed-up. I thought it was one of the most revolting things I’d ever done.”
Then the financial crisis struck and he “hit a brick wall”, he says – emotionally, but also in terms of the economy and the digital revolution. “Everything just changed,” he says, and he admits he came a bit unstuck. “I came back and had all this work to do, and Steidl said they’d publish it, but then they didn’t, then it was on the table with someone else, and then someone else. And I’ve seen it happen with so many people – you just become really obsessed. You can’t see that maybe the work isn’t anywhere near as good as you think it is.”
A Hypo Full of Love, his forthcoming book, pits some of his work from this time, when he was living with a group of friends in Notting Hill, against material dating back to the early 1990s. The images alternate between portraits, pictures of empty meeting rooms, flowers, and some exquisite still lifes of recently occupied but empty beds, the white sheets and duvets swollen into evocative, sculptural forms. For McConnell, they were “a series of mediations, a type of portraiture in absence”.
The title comes from a song by the Brixton-based band Alabama 3, a trancey parody of the 12-step programme, whose lyrics McConnell emails a few days after our interview. “Brothers and sisters I have a confession to make,” it begins, “I’ve been a Goddamn fool, hanging out on street corners with hoes and junkies/living mah life soo low,” moving to a chorus of “shoot me up/yeah, ya will be all mine/shoot me up/every damn day,” and so on. He tells me, “I thought it might help a little in terms of understanding the fundamental narrative of the work. A kind of quest for oneness… all the running about we do in a bid to ease the pain and overcome our inescapable aloneness.”
He talks a lot about love, and how humans are all searching for a way to find it – for him, he says, drugs have been part of that journey. I ask if his work has also been about that search, and he answers, “Pretty much”.
“It’s been a very mixed bag, but if there’s anything that resonates through my work it’s probably addiction, or some desire for altered space,” he says. “People think I’m some massive clubber, but it’s not that, they’re missing the point. I don’t know whether it’s particularly drugs-related, or whether it’s more like an existential thing. I’m just clawing away at something… just to try to get at something, is all I want.”
See more of Gareth’s work here.
Close Your Eyes is published by SPBH Editions, priced at £40.
