A twelve-year visual journey stretching across continents has culminated in a stark visual chronicle of global dissent and resistance to authoritarianism. Photographer Matthew Connors has condensed twenty years of work into The Axe Will Survive the Master, a recently published volume released by MACK Books that captures pivotal moments of protest and political upheaval from New York to Hong Kong, Kiev to Pyongyang. Sourced from an archive of 200,000 images, Connors combines images documenting America’s Occupy movement, Hong Kong’s pro-democracy demonstrations, the war in Ukraine, and revolts across Egypt, North Korea and Cuba—producing a interconnected visual narrative that transcends geographical boundaries. The work traces how people across the globe have confronted authoritarian rule, revealing patterns of mass gathering, revolutionary fervour, totalitarian authority and outright conflict across markedly distinct contexts.
A Decade Spanning Several Continents
Connors’ project represents a conscious break from conventional photojournalism’s compartmentalised approach. Rather than treating each uprising as an discrete event, he understood that the political forces reshaping the globe operate as interconnected systems. Initially, he sought to develop individual monographs from his archives—one focused on Ukraine, another on America, a third on Hong Kong, and a fourth on North Korea. Yet these separate narratives seemed incomplete and predictable. It was not until Connors took a step back to examine his vantage point throughout all these locations simultaneously that the true power of his work emerged. The resulting collection removes the constructed boundaries that conventionally divide stories of dissent.
The photographer found inspiration in cultural theorist Mark Fisher’s concept of “Capitalist Realism,” which outlines how the established political and economic structures seems to foreclose our ability to imagine alternatives. Connors aimed to capture those rare moments when this foreclosure briefly breaks apart—when “another way of being came into view.” His images act as visual evidence to these breaches, recording the instances where group action briefly suspended the inevitability of the status quo. By presenting photographs without labels or geographical identifiers, Connors forces viewers to confront the universal patterns underlying these varied struggles.
- Photographs from America, Hong Kong, Ukraine and North Korea
- 200,000 visual materials arranged into a single interconnected sequence
- Documents group formation through authoritarian governance to war
- Analyses American foreign policy’s role in international tensions
From Singular Stories to Linked Tales
The development of Connors’ framework reveals a fundamental shift in how we understand international resistance. What began as distinct regional initiatives—each significant enough to justify independent release—slowly became apparent as something far more cohesive when considered comprehensively. The photographic collection of 200,000 images housed the essential substance for multiple monographs, yet presenting them in isolation seemed limiting. By analysing his work across all contexts simultaneously, Connors discovered that the political dynamics he had documented were not simply parallel occurrences but rather manifestations of the same systemic forces operating across different terrains. This understanding completely reshaped his complete strategy to arrangement and exhibition.
The subsequent publication, The Axe Will Survive the Master, constitutes the apex of this conceptual breakthrough. Rather than arranging images by geographic location or time period, Connors constructed a single continuous narrative that charts an pattern of escalation: from mass gathering through revolutionary transformation, into authoritarian rule and surveillance-based oppression, culminating in outright warfare. This arrangement deliberately obscures geographic boundaries, allowing viewers to recognise the underlying architecture of power and resistance that surpasses national borders. The book operates as a pictorial statement about mutual connection—a assertion that the struggles documented in Hong Kong, Ukraine, America and North Korea are fundamentally linked by common systems of authoritarian control and unified opposition.
Surpassing Geographic Limitations
Connors’ decision to display photographs lacking captions or geographical markers represents a deliberate editorial choice with substantial implications. By removing the contextual details that conventionally grounds photojournalism, he encourages viewers to perceive patterns that could otherwise remain obscured by geographic specificity. Images from New York sit alongside those from Pyongyang, not to suggest equivalence between radically different political systems, but to highlight the common patterns of state power and citizen resistance. This approach questions the viewer’s instinct to categorise and compartmentalise, compelling a engagement with uncomfortable similarities across contexts that mainstream media accounts typically treat as entirely separate.
The political forces depicted in the book, Connors insists, are essentially systemic and interwoven rather than geographically constrained phenomena. American foreign policy, in particular, weaves through numerous contexts recorded here, influencing dynamics from Ukraine to Hong Kong. By removing the visual and narrative boundaries between these locations, the photographer demonstrates how transnational capitalism and authoritarian rule operate as transnational systems. Viewers are forced to acknowledge that understanding dissent in any individual location demands engagement with its relationship to power structures working across the entire planet.
The Photographer’s Methodology and Approach
Matthew Connors’ approach emerged from a profound dedication to capturing political conflict at its most raw. Rather than parachuting into conflict areas with predetermined narratives, he immersed himself in populations undergoing transformation, allowing his grasp to develop organically through sustained presence and observation. This method demanded both patience and vulnerability—the willingness to stay within challenging circumstances sufficiently to allow for genuine instances to emerge. His archive of 200,000 images represents not just photographic record but an amassed affective and analytical grappling with the functioning of authority across multiple locations and political circumstances.
The challenge of synthesizing this vast photographic content into a unified artistic statement required Connors to interrogate his own perspective as an American photographer documenting worldwide protest. He wrestled with issues surrounding representation, implication and accountability, particularly regarding America’s interventionist foreign policy and its part in influencing the same disputes he was capturing. This reflective consciousness sets apart his work from standard photojournalistic practice, transforming it into something more akin to photographic philosophy—an attempt to comprehend structural patterns rather than merely document surface events. The final publication demonstrates extensive editorial deliberation about which images could speak most powerfully when freed from geographic constraints.
- Deep involvement in communities rather than brief journalistic assignments
- Archival accumulation of 200,000 images across a dozen years of work
- In-depth investigation of US international policy’s worldwide consequences
- Abandonment of conventional news photo captions and explanatory notes
- Merging of political analysis with visual and emotional impact
Discovering Truth Via Presence
Connors’ dedication to being present—to merely showing up as events developed—distinguishes his approach from more transactional forms of documentary photography. He pursued what Mark Fisher called “glimmers” of alternative possibility: moments where the closure of the future momentarily fractured, revealing spaces where alternative modes of existence became imaginable. This required patience, openness and a readiness to remain in situations of genuine danger and uncertainty. His photographs capture not just the external manifestations of protest and conflict, but the inner emotional landscape inhabited by those resisting authoritarian power.
The photographs themselves become evidence of a specific form of witnessing—one that rejects easy resolution or comfortable distance. By placing his camera within the midst of collective action, Connors documents the intimate scale of political struggle: the faces of individuals challenging state power, the ephemeral structures of resistance, the vulnerability of bodies moving. This methodology recognises that comprehending political reality demands more than observation from the sidelines; it demands a form of commitment demonstrated via sustained, engaged observation. The resulting images bear the weight of that commitment.
Past Simple Recording: Creative Work and Understanding
Connors’ strategy transcends conventional photojournalism by using his archive as unrefined source material for creative arrangement rather than a archive of explained images. The strategic exclusion of spatial identifiers and contextual captions requires observers to confront images on their distinct footing, discerning relationships and correlations throughout different settings without the scaffolding of traditional journalistic framing. This compositional approach expresses a fundamental belief: that the systemic forces propelling worldwide resistance transcend geographic limits, and that visual language can convey these links more powerfully than words. The final arrangement becomes a mode of ideological statement expressed through aesthetic means.
This artistic method demands active participation from the viewer, who must navigate the book’s sequence without fixed interpretation. Rather than presenting isolated moments of conflict, Connors builds a layered narrative that develops emotional and intellectual energy. Each photograph gains resonance from its neighbours, creating dialogues between images divided across geography and time. The lack of captions becomes a form of resistance itself—against the simplification of complex political realities to digestible soundbites, against the taming of struggle into palatable narratives. The photographs demand ambiguity, complexity and the viewer’s own interpretive labour.
The Impact of Images Without Text Descriptions
By removing personal details, Connors liberates his images from the constraints of particular places and moments. A barricade in Hong Kong mirrors one in Kyiv; a assembly in Cairo speaks to New York. This visual language of resistance becomes universalised without sacrificing particularity—each photograph retains its documentary specificity whilst contributing to a broader case about worldwide trends of dissent. The absence of captions prompts audiences to create their personal interpretive approaches, promoting more careful observation and greater critical interaction with what photographs actually show rather than what captions instruct them to perceive.
This editorial approach recognises photography’s inherent ambiguity and the multiple meanings images are capable of creating. Without captions grounding interpretation, viewers encounter the raw political and emotional content of photographs—the vulnerability, anger, determination and shared determination captured in bodies and spaces. The book functions as a conversation between image and viewer rather than a transmission of information from author to audience. This method respects both the intricacy of the political situations depicted and the awareness of those encountering these photographs, inviting them into active meaning-making rather than passive reception.
Cycles of Hope and Disillusionment
Connors’ twelve-year collection documents a consistent theme that characterises modern political conflict: periods of shared optimism giving way to institutional repression. The Occupy movement’s early potential of collective decision-making gave way to state violence; Egypt’s uprising energy was undermined by autocratic control; Hong Kong’s democracy demonstrations were crushed by security legislation; Ukraine’s struggle escalated to survival conflict. These sequences are in no way disconnected occurrences but manifestations of what Connors describes as a international framework of suppression, where governments counter dissent with escalating degrees of coercion. The photographer’s lens records this trajectory throughout various territories, revealing how similar patterns of opposition and state response unfold in varied settings, propelled by intrinsically related political forces.
What comes forth from this record is neither naïve optimism nor complete despair, but rather a sophisticated grasp of struggle’s persistence despite repeated setbacks. Connors’ work indicates that even when movements are suppressed, the conditions generating them remain unaddressed. People continue to gather, organise and push back because the core grievances—economic inequality, democratic deficit, authoritarian control—endure. The book rejects simple narratives of victory or defeat, instead depicting dissent as an ongoing condition of contemporary life. By sequencing images across geographical and temporal boundaries, Connors demonstrates that these struggles are interconnected expressions of a shared human impulse to imagine and fight for alternatives, however temporarily those alternatives emerge into visibility.
- Occupy’s initial promise dissolved into police crackdowns and scattering across America
- Egypt’s uprising was systematically extinguished by state authoritarianism and surveillance
- Hong Kong’s sustained resistance was eventually crushed through security legislation and military deployment