From his east London studio, photographer Gareth McConnell tells AnOther about the spontaneous, surveillance-style photographs in new his book, Windows
Gareth McConnell doesn’t see things like everyone else. He sees the world in technicolour, as his photographs of wild horses illuminated in neon light and his psychedelic flower arrangements attest. His take on street photography is equally vivid. In his new photo book, Window, published by Sorika, McConnell brings together beautifully grainy crops of scenes from his bedroom window in east London – a supermarket carpark, a funeral car passing by, strangers going about their day.
Throughout the book’s diptychs, McConnell documents his lively and diverse local community, assigning an almost religious significance to the situations he perceives from his vantage point. Among the portraits are interstitial images, heavy with symbolism. An aeroplane suspended in the London sky might suggest the firmament or the blue yonder, while shots of sunlit streets, rainbows and streetlights are otherworldly and, at times, mystical.
Continuing the religious iconography, a figure in one photograph is depicted with their arms outstretched, crucifix-like. In another, there’s “a guy hitting another guy with a chain with a massive padlock on it – which reminds me of The Flagellation of Christ with witnesses looking on who don’t know what to do.”
Talking through the images in Windows, McConnell explains, “Here’s a funeral car, undertakers, an anonymous mourner. This symbolises a departure, and a journey to the afterlife, with the undertakers as spirit guides from this world to the next.” Turning the page to a photo of a mother and her child, he says, “Look closely, you can see the little boy’s face in the tattoo on the mother’s arm. And the kid – look how happy he is.”
McConnell’s figures were photographed spontaneously, surveillance-style (UK law permits photographing public spaces). “My previous work has been very staged, formalised with model release forms and set parameters,” he says. “Working this way reveals something else. Look at this expression,” he gestures to a portrait in the book, “You’d never capture such reverie in a posed sitting.”
Shooting ad hoc, it took McConnell 11 years to capture the images for Windows. “I kept a Nikon SLR near the window all the time, and if I heard a kerfuffle from outside, I’d grab my camera to capture it, or to shoot the top deck of the bus going past.” At one point, McConnell procured a telephoto lens, but found that cropping the wider film or digital shots was more impactful.
Much of the work focuses on the supermarket, which, according to McConnell, is “a sacred site, a locus of desire, a cornucopia and a destination of pilgrimage”. He describes how the supermarket draws people towards it like a magnet. During Covid, he photographed the vast queues that would form outside as people waited, socially distanced, in the car park to enter. He was fascinated with the security guard, describing him as a modern day Saint Peter, monitoring who comes and goes from the sliding doors of the sacred site.
He turns to an image of police officers, mounted on horseback. “They’re on their way to the riots, the four horsemen of the apocalypse,” McConnell observes. Having grown up just outside Belfast in the 70s, the photographer considers the police “as agents enforcing moral or social hierarchy, positioned against the everyday marginalised folk, both the working class as well as beggars and thieves, to uphold power structures at the expense of the vulnerable.”
Between 2011 and 2022, McConnell also spent time documenting the Coalition’s austerity, the London riots of 2011 and the pandemic. “It took such a long time to work out how I would use them,” he says, gesturing to boxes and boxes of negatives and prints accumulated over the years – all labelled with the working title, Lidl. “I always shoot first, figure it out later,” he explains. “Now it’s published, and I’m so happy it’s finally finished.”
Window by Gareth McConnell is published by Sorika and is out now.
