£2,000.00
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Gareth McConnell’s Sex, Drugs & Magick is a raw and hypnotic reworking of his iconic Ibiza portraits, an uncompromising meditation on hedonism, altered consciousness, and the alchemy of photography itself. As Philippe Azoury declares, this is “an absolute masterpiece of our time.” McConnell moves beyond the usual narratives of excess and abandon, instead capturing something more elusive—the flickering tension between ecstasy and emptiness, between communion and isolation, between reality and hallucination.
Shot between 2002 and 2011, McConnell’s portraits document a defining era of Ibiza’s rave culture, a period when the island was both a sanctuary for seekers and a battleground for commercial interests. Yet his work resists nostalgia, instead revisiting the archive to interrogate the passage of time and the shifting meanings of these moments. This act of returning is central to McConnell’s artistic practice—his images are never fixed, but continuously reworked, reshaped, and reconsidered.
Inspired by Robert Anton Wilson’s countercultural classic of the same name, McConnell’s project is infused with a deep engagement with psychedelic philosophy, Timothy Leary’s explorations of consciousness, and Terence McKenna’s insights into rave culture as a quasi-spiritual movement. This book does not merely document Ibiza’s young revelers but interrogates the very nature of escapism—how pleasure, intoxication, and transcendence intersect in ways that are both liberating and deeply commodified.
McConnell’s process is integral to the work’s unsettling power. Originally captured in vibrant color, these images have been reworked into grainy, lo-fi monochromes, stripped of their initial gloss and subjected to a process of degradation—photocopied, overexposed, distorted, and reassembled. By embracing the imperfections of outmoded reprographic techniques, McConnell introduces a deliberate instability, mirroring the ephemerality of the experiences he depicts. This act of visual deconstruction reframes his subjects, shifting them from documentary realism into a darker, more abstract meditation on time, memory, and the fragility of identity.
The result is an atmosphere thick with ambiguity—a pre-storm tension, the electric stillness between night and morning, between exaltation and withdrawal. It is the reveller’s moment of disorientation, uncertain whether the birds outside herald the arrival of dawn or the end of something nameless. McConnell’s images inhabit this liminal space, evoking what he calls “dead or non-time”—the disjointed, stretched-out hours between ecstatic peaks, where the search for transcendence confronts the weight of reality.
One particularly striking image captures a young, beautiful man sitting bare-chested on a bed, gazing directly into the lens. The stark patterns of the mattress and scattered detritus below him create a collision of textures, grounding him in an environment that feels both intimate and transient. The bare white wall behind him amplifies the stillness of the moment, emphasizing the contrast between his physical presence and the unseen energies that linger in the frame. His expression, caught somewhere between vulnerability and defiance, encapsulates the essence of McConnell’s vision—youth suspended in the gaps between revelry and reflection, between the physical and the metaphysical.
In treating his own photographs with a kind of ritualistic destruction, McConnell reflects on photography’s capacity to manipulate memory, to distort and elevate experience, just as drugs and music alter perception. His work aligns with the broader history of portraiture but dismantles traditional expectations, presenting his subjects not as passive muses but as active participants in an existential search—whether for escape, connection, or a fleeting sense of the infinite.
Beyond the images themselves, Sex, Drugs & Magick also functions as a broader critique of the forces that shape contemporary hedonism. Ibiza, long mythologized as a utopian playground, is at once a site of liberation and a machine of commercialized escapism, where the human need for transcendence is packaged, sold, and consumed. McConnell sees Ibiza itself as a metaphor—an island caught between myth and reality, desire and disillusionment, utopia and exploitation. His portraits suggest that beneath the hedonistic spectacle lies something far more primal—the age-old longing to dissolve the self, to outrun mortality, to touch something beyond the physical.