Close Your Eyes

Close Your Eyes fuses Gareth McConnell's portraits of ravers photographed in Ibiza with his own and found archival images of pivotal moments in recent British history, building a kaleidoscopic, color-saturated sequence around the collective loss of self that runs through rave culture.

Published by SPBH Editions in 2014 with an accompanying text by the novelist Niall Griffiths, the 116-page first edition threads references to the 1985 Battle of the Beanfield and the 2011 London riots through nightclub imagery and photographs connected to the Osho movement, whose followers are credited with bringing ecstasy into Ibiza's clubs. The book reads less as documentary than as an immersive, rhythmically edited object meant to replicate the disorientation of the rave itself.

McConnell is a Northern Irish photographer whose work frequently returns to subcultures, ritual, and altered states, moving between staged portraiture and found or archival material. His practice treats the photobook as a constructed experience rather than a neutral record of what the camera saw.