In 2022, the New York Times sent six photographers around the world “in search of animal encounters” for their Voyages edition. One of these assigned to the project was Northern Irish photographer Gareth McConnell who ended up dispatched to Iceland. He travelled to Skeiðvellir about 50 miles east of Reykjavík which is home to Icelandic Horseworld, a tourist attraction on the premises.
“I really wanted to summon up the more mystical, fluid, wild aspect,” McConnell says of his decision to infuse his shots with vivid flares of colour. “I thought the horses were such a contemporary metaphor,” McConnell says.
“There’s the sense that we are looking at the specter of nuclear war and environmental catastrophe and societal breakdown — and there’s the horse being a symbol of that lost link between humanity and nature.”
He has now brought out an accompanying book of these large format saturated colour images or “My Little Ponies on Mars” as Sam Anderson, who wrote the accompanying article, describes them.
You can see Gareth’s latest body of work ‘Paramilitaries’ in our In the Frame section.
Sorika, £47.95 (limited edition of 1000)
