Sorika

Gareth McConnell: The Meaning of Flowers

‘I was more focused on making political work, whether it be about drug addiction or the situation in Northern Ireland. To take something like flowers and really try and make the subject matter your own is difficult.’

Towards the end of March, the London-based photographer Gareth McConnell returned to Northern Ireland to shoot a series of portraits of young people in his home town, Carrickfergus, and nearby Larne. The portraits were commissioned by Intercomm, a Belfast-based cross-community project, and the subjects, aged between seven and 26, were members of local loyalist marching bands. McConnell’s aim, he says, was “to transcend the cliched depictions of young people from Protestant working-class communities by evoking the more primal instincts that underlie these rituals of belonging”.