Sex, Drugs and Magick

Gareth McConnell's Sex, Drugs and Magick looks past the sunlit cliche of Ibiza to the people who built its rave and club culture, rendered in grainy, high-contrast black and white.

McConnell shot the island's clubbers, DJs, and dawn stragglers over repeated visits, then pushed the images through a photocopier to strip out tonal nuance and leave faces as near-abstract fields of grain, a process he used to unify the sequence and hold it apart from documentary reportage. The book is accompanied by an essay from Matthew Collin, author of Altered State: The Story of Ecstasy Culture and Acid House, situating the pictures within the island's role in the spread of dance-music culture from the 1980s onward. It was published by Sorika in a limited edition.

McConnell, a Northern Irish photographer based in London, has worked across club culture, landscape, and portraiture, including further Ibiza-set projects that return to the same territory in a darker register. Sex, Drugs and Magick remains the clearest statement of his interest in subcultures viewed from the inside rather than as spectacle.