CLOSE YOUR EYES by Gareth McConnell

ロンドンを拠点とするイギリス人フォトグラファー、ガレス・マコーネル(Gareth McConnell)の作品集。本書は作者がイビサ島で撮影したレイブ会場での若者たちのポートレイトと、過去のイギリスの歴史的事件の瞬間のアーカイブフォト(自身の写真やファウンドフォト)を組み合わせて構成された一冊である。万華鏡のような狂乱的なイメージや、クラブのライトのような鮮やかな色彩の連続は、人間の自己を失うような快楽や高揚感を表現している。カルト作家ニール・グリフィスによるテキストを収録した冊子付き。

Close Your Eyes is a frenzied reworking of the accumulated archive of photographer Gareth McConnell. An onslaught of kaleidoscopic imagery fuses portraits he took of rave-goers in Ibiza with pictures he both shot and found of a number of key moments in recent British history, from the 1985 Battle of the Beanfield to the London Riots of 2011. Amongst this we find collected references to the Zen mystic Osho, whose people are said to have experimented with Ecstasy and taken it into clubs in Ibiza for the first time. This is a personal, political body of work–a frustrated meditation on the nature of human occurrence, the power of mass communion in it’s many forms, and the delirious experience of losing oneself to hedonism from the view of someone who saw it from within. As an object, the book is an immersive experience, galvanized with the same primal energy of the rave, it’s rapture and it’s ecstasy. Rythmn, Pulse, Rave, Repeat. 

by Gareth McConnell

REGULAR PRICE ¥10,450  (tax incl.)

hardcover
116 pages
267 x 216 mm
color
limited edition of 1,000 copies 
2014

published by SPBH EDITIONS