Between 2011 and 2022, Gareth McConnell created an unusual series of images of London. Photographed from within his own home, by pointing a camera out of a second-storey window, they capture people, relationships, situations in the course of everyday life. People walk, hold hands, huddle, gesture and fight. The city pulses. Directly across the road from McConnell’s window, in a supermarket car park the spectacle of ordinary life unfolds in a series of striking tableaus. Along the busy street, wheels turn, carrying people to their destinations via pram, bicycle, car and bus. Beneath the window the graphic ‘X’ of a woman, her arms flung out in protest, stands out against the regular pattern of paving slabs. On a different day, the tracks of feet, trollies and bikes mark out lines of desire across the snowy ground. Elsewhere, the camera plays with light to inspire mystical effects. In long exposure pictures, the moon’s milky glow is mirrored in the pale spillages of streetlamps and headlights. The sun anoints a lone figure standing alongside her shopping and transforms a nearby pillar into a transcendent shaft of light. Or it shines starkly overhead bringing out the sheen in the coat of a mounted police horse. These varied glimpses, all observed from the same vantage point, show the city in a state of constant change and renewal. —Ellen Mara De Wachter
