This photo book documents a decade of east London’s febrile street life

At first glance, the premise for Gareth McConnell’s newly published photography book, Window, is fairly straightforward. As the title suggests, the Belfast-born, London-based photographer pointed a camera outside the window of his east London flat hundreds of times between 2011 and 2022, capturing, through this sustained observation, moments of joy, grief, violence, love and everyday happenings. There are photographs of people crossing the street, pushing a shopping trolley, waiting at a bus stop, talking on the phone, or lighting a cigarette; familiar images of urban life. You can almost hear the footsteps, shouting, dogs barking, police sirens and a baby crying in the distance.

However, these quotidian scenes, sometimes tightly cropped or bathed in the light of streetlamps, recast our fixed perceptions of the mundane. “The primary ambition of the work is to elevate ordinary life as seen outside my window to moral and cosmic significance,” McConnell shares with Dazed. “I’m looking at the supermarket car park opposite my window as a modern sacred site, a locus of desire. I’m thinking of the people I see on these streets as pilgrims of this desire performing an almost ritualised dance of decision-making that echoes ancient human struggle and how to navigate resources, temptation and social order.” 

Flipping through the photobook, one notices its unique quality, revealed in part through McConnell’s experimentation in the darkroom, but also through the sequencing and layout: each spread is designed to represent a single piece of work bound by a spiral, with each spread signifying a particular narrative. “I took these photographs for over a decade, and had all these ideas in my head, and I have spent the last few years trying to work through it and nail what I wanted to make”, McConnell explains.

For him, this process of working through was spending time in the darkroom, printing the images, cropping them, scanning negatives, and experimenting with layout. “Shooting was one thing, but the process of looking at the pictures, sitting with them and figuring out how to showcase them in a meaningful way was another, which is how I came to look at this photographic work through the conceptual framework of a religious painting made up of diptychs.”

The primary ambition of the work is to elevate ordinary life as seen outside my window to moral and cosmic significance – Gareth McConnell

If we consider the context of the decade Window spans, it becomes clearer that these images of London are underpinned by struggle. McConnell asserts that this period marked the “shitty end of neoliberalism and the ushering in of austerity”. In addition to this, in 2011, when the first photographs in the book were taken, 29-year-old Mark Duggan was murdered by the Metropolitan Police, resulting in protests and riots across London. The series acknowledges this descent of the city into becoming a police state with several photographs of officers patrolling the car park, speaking to young men, or holding them down and injuring them in the process. In more than one instance, police are even riding up on horseback. “The police, who repeatedly appear in the images, are positioned by society as agents of divine and cosmic law, but are merely agents of the establishment upholding the secret order of commerce,” McConnell explains. 

Apart from the images of the police, the majority of the photographs in the book attempt to foster a sense of kinship with the people around us. To do so, McConell references the philosophical writing of Emmanuel Levinas, who believed that the face of another is the site of radical difference, reminding us of the multitudes each person carries within them. In Window, this philosophy manifests in the several closely cropped images of people’s faces that often accompany the photographs of overexposed streetscapes or bodies in motion. These tightly contained images document creases, smiles, pursed lips, and eyes deep in thought, creating portraits that engender, at once, both a feeling of relationality and complex difference. 

“The work is meant to be very loving, and I wanted it to be loving because the world right now has descended into neoliberal madness with everything that is going on in Gaza, Trump’s second term, the disastrous Labour government and the rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform. We’re devouring ourselves, and I wanted to make something that would be very loving and harp on a sense of unity,“ McConnell shares, noting how crucial it is that we don’t see each other as the enemy, despite it being the popular narrative shared by political parties. “Yes, we are different, but we are also somehow the same. We all participate in this grind of love, and we’re all trying to survive, look after our kids, get to work, and clothe ourselves. It is the reality of existence, but we have forgotten about the fundamental driving force of love within all that.”

The final spread in Window, a photograph of a group of people huddled together, paired with an image of a beaming streetlight that adds an otherworldly element to the dark blue sky, is a manifestation of this reality of human existence, and a reminder of McConnell’s insistence that “we are each other". 

Gareth McConnell’s Window (published by Public Knowledge Books) is available to order here now.