Sex, Drugs and Magick by Gareth McConnell

This isn’t nostalgia. It’s necromancy.

In his latest incantation of image and alchemy, Gareth McConnell returns to his spectral Ibiza—no longer the sunlit postcard of flesh and euphoria, but a haunted theatre of youth caught in the throes of something deeper than just ecstasy, sex, and serotonin sunsets. 

These aren’t mere photographs, but echoes—reverberations of lived chaos stilled into frames. A long-standing ritualist of the lens, McConnell trades in his polished apparatus for an embrace of imperfection: grain-heavy monochromes, ghosted duplications, smudged tonal ghosts. He delights in the beautiful failure of obsolete printcraft, like a magician savoring the crackle of a faulty spell.

McConnell’s eye remains razor-sharp, rooted in the traditions of the documentarian. But here, he slips the leash of reportage, arranging his subjects not as data, but as shadows in a low-lit fable. The book hums with the tremble of a storm yet to break—the breathless charge of something imminent. His Ibiza is no longer a place on Earth, but a borderland of blurred nights and ambiguous awakenings, where the reveller stumbles unsure if the birds outside are heralds of morning, or the cruel mockery of dusk.

In this work, photography becomes both subject and spell—less a record of reality than a séance for it.