A twelve-year long visual journey spanning continents has culminated in a powerful photographic record of worldwide resistance and authoritarian resistance. Photographer Matthew Connors has distilled twenty years of work into The Axe Will Survive the Master, a new book published by MACK Books that documents pivotal moments of protest and political upheaval from New York to Hong Kong, Kiev to Pyongyang. Drawing from an collection of 200,000 images, Connors weaves together images documenting America’s Occupy movement, Hong Kong’s pro-democracy demonstrations, the war in Ukraine, and uprisings across Egypt, North Korea and Cuba—creating a interconnected visual narrative that transcends geographic limits. The work traces how people across the globe have confronted authoritarian rule, exposing instances of collective assembly, revolutionary fervour, totalitarian control and outright conflict across markedly distinct contexts.
A Decade Spanning Multiple Continents
Connors’ project represents a deliberate departure from traditional photojournalism’s siloed methodology. Rather than treating each uprising as an discrete event, he understood that the political forces reshaping the globe function as interconnected systems. Initially, he tried to build separate monographs from his archives—one focused on Ukraine, another on America, one on Hong Kong, and one on North Korea. Yet these individual narratives felt incomplete and predictable. It was only when Connors took a step back to examine his vantage point across all these geographies at the same time that the true power of his work emerged. The resulting collection dissolves the artificial boundaries that conventionally divide stories of dissent.
The photographer found inspiration in cultural theorist Mark Fisher’s concept of “Capitalist Realism,” which describes how the existing political and economic order seems to limit our ability to envision alternatives. Connors sought to capture those fleeting occasions when this foreclosure temporarily ruptures—when “another way of being came into view.” His images act as visual testimony to these breaches, capturing the instances where group action briefly suspended the inevitability of the status quo. By presenting photographs without titles or location information, Connors forces viewers to confront the common patterns beneath these varied struggles.
- Images from America, Hong Kong, Ukraine and North Korea
- 200,000 visual materials arranged into a unified continuous narrative
- Traces group formation through totalitarian control to war
- Analyses US international policy’s role in global conflict dynamics
From Singular Stories to Connected Narratives
The evolution of Connors’ methodology reflects a fundamental shift in how we interpret worldwide protest. What originated from separate geographical projects—each considerable enough to merit standalone distribution—progressively emerged as something far more cohesive when viewed holistically. The photographic collection of 200,000 images held the foundational content for multiple monographs, yet displaying them separately appeared restrictive. By examining his work across every context at once, Connors discovered that the political dynamics he had captured were not just concurrent events but rather reflections of comparable underlying forces working across distinct regions. This realisation completely reshaped his whole methodology to sequencing and presentation.
The resulting publication, The Axe Will Survive the Master, represents the apex of this intellectual shift. Rather than arranging images by location or chronology, Connors created a unbroken narrative that charts an escalatory pattern: from mass gathering through revolutionary upheaval, into totalitarian control and surveillance repression, concluding in open conflict. This arrangement deliberately obscures national borders, allowing viewers to recognise the fundamental structure of authority and opposition that surpasses national borders. The book operates as a pictorial statement about interconnectedness—a assertion that the struggles documented in Hong Kong, Ukraine, America and North Korea are fundamentally linked by shared mechanisms of oppression and collective resistance.
Transcending Geographic Constraints
Connors’ decision to present photographs lacking captions or geographical markers constitutes a deliberate editorial choice with substantial implications. By stripping away the contextual details that traditionally anchors photojournalism, he invites viewers to perceive patterns that might otherwise stay hidden by geographic specificity. Images from New York sit alongside those from Pyongyang, not to suggest equivalence between fundamentally distinct political systems, but to highlight the universal dynamics of state power and citizen resistance. This approach challenges the viewer’s instinct to separate and isolate, compelling a engagement with uncomfortable similarities across contexts that dominant media narratives conventionally present as entirely separate.
The political dynamics depicted in the book, Connors insists, are essentially systemic and interwoven rather than geographically bounded phenomena. American international policy, in particular, weaves through multiple contexts recorded here, influencing dynamics from Ukraine to Hong Kong. By breaking down the visual and narrative boundaries between these locations, the photographer shows how global capitalism and authoritarian control operate as transnational systems. Viewers are forced to understand that comprehending dissent in any individual location demands engagement with its relationship to power systems working across the entire planet.
The Photographer’s Method and Strategy
Matthew Connors’ methodology emerged from a deeply personal commitment to capturing political conflict at its most raw. Rather than arriving unannounced in crisis zones with pre-set storylines, he embedded himself within societies in flux, allowing his comprehension to unfold naturally through sustained presence and observation. This strategy demanded both restraint and openness—the readiness to remain in uncomfortable situations long enough for genuine instances to reveal themselves. His repository of 200,000 images embodies not simply technical documentation but an gathered emotional and intellectual reckoning with how power operates across multiple locations and political circumstances.
The challenge of synthesizing this extensive visual material into a unified creative work required Connors to interrogate his own position as an American photographer recording global dissent. He wrestled with issues surrounding depiction, complicity and responsibility, particularly regarding America’s interventionist foreign policy and its role in shaping the very conflicts he was capturing. This reflective consciousness sets apart his work from conventional photojournalism, transforming it into something more akin to visual philosophy—an effort to comprehend structural patterns rather than merely document surface events. The resulting book demonstrates extensive editorial consideration about which images could resonate most strongly when liberated from geographic constraints.
- Deep involvement in communities rather than brief journalistic assignments
- Extensive archive of 200,000 images across twelve years of work
- In-depth investigation of US international policy’s global implications
- Departure from traditional photojournalistic captions and contextual markers
- Integration of political commentary with visual and emotional impact
Discovering Truth Via Presence
Connors’ dedication to presence—to simply being there as events developed—sets apart his approach from more transactional forms of documentary photography. He pursued what Mark Fisher called “glimmers” of other possibilities: moments where the closure of the future momentarily fractured, exposing spaces where alternative modes of existence became imaginable. This required patience, openness and a willingness 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 serve as evidence of a particular kind of witnessing—one that rejects easy resolution or comfortable distance. By positioning his camera at the heart of collective action, Connors captures the close-up nature 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 requires more than observation from the sidelines; it demands a form of commitment demonstrated via sustained, attentive presence. The resulting images bear the weight of that commitment.
More Than Documentation: Art and Interpretation
Connors’ strategy transcends traditional photojournalistic practice by using his archive as foundational content for creative arrangement rather than a archive of explained images. The deliberate removal of geographic markers and contextual captions requires observers to confront images on their own terms, recognising patterns and correlations throughout different settings without the support of conventional news presentation. This compositional approach demonstrates a fundamental belief: that the underlying dynamics fuelling international protest function across national lines, and that imagery can communicate these relationships more effectively than text. The completed progression becomes a form of political argument conveyed via artistic methods.
This artistic approach requires active participation from the viewer, who must work through the book’s progression without predetermined interpretation. Rather than offering isolated instances of conflict, Connors creates a accumulating narrative that builds emotional and intellectual momentum. Each photograph draws resonance from its neighbours, creating dialogues between images separated by geography and time. The lack of captions operates as a form of resistance itself—against the simplification of complex political realities to palatable summaries, against the domestication of struggle into acceptable narratives. The photographs emphasise ambiguity, complexity and the viewer’s own interpretive labour.
The Influence of Pictures Lacking Captions
By stripping away personal details, Connors frees his images from the constraints of particular places and moments. A barrier in Hong Kong resonates with one in Kyiv; a assembly in Cairo reverberates toward New York. This visual grammar of resistance becomes universalised without losing specificity—each image maintains its documentary specificity whilst contributing to a larger argument about global patterns of protest. The absence of captions prompts audiences to create their personal interpretive approaches, encouraging deeper looking and more critical engagement with what images genuinely reveal rather than what captions instruct them to perceive.
This editorial methodology acknowledges photography’s fundamental ambiguity and the multiple meanings images can generate. Without captions grounding interpretation, viewers face the raw emotional and political content of photographs—the vulnerability, anger, determination and shared determination captured in bodies and spaces. The book operates as a dialogue between image and viewer rather than a conveyance of facts from author to audience. This method respects both the intricacy of the political situations depicted and the awareness of those encountering these photographs, drawing them toward active sense-making rather than passive consumption.
Waves of Aspiration and Letdown
Connors’ twelve-year collection captures a consistent theme that defines current political tensions: moments of collective hope followed by institutional repression. The Occupy movement’s initial promise of democratic assembly yielded to security operations; Egypt’s transformative momentum was extinguished by authoritarian consolidation; Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests were crushed by security legislation; Ukraine’s defence escalated to survival conflict. These sequences are in no way separate events but expressions of what Connors identifies as a international framework of suppression, where regimes respond to resistance with escalating degrees of repression. The visual documentation records this arc across multiple continents, demonstrating how comparable cycles of opposition and state response unfold in distinct situations, driven by fundamentally interconnected systemic pressures.
What comes forth from this documentation is neither naïve optimism nor complete despair, but rather a sophisticated grasp of the persistence of struggle despite repeated setbacks. Connors’ work indicates that even when movements are suppressed, the conditions that generate them remain unaddressed. People continue to gather, organise and resist because the underlying grievances—economic inequality, democratic shortfall, authoritarian control—endure. The book refuses simple narratives of victory or defeat, instead depicting dissent as an persistent condition of contemporary life. By arranging images across geographical and temporal boundaries, Connors shows that these conflicts are linked expressions of a shared human impulse to imagine and fight for alternatives, however briefly those alternatives appear into visibility.
- Occupy’s initial promise gave way to law enforcement operations and dispersal across America
- Egypt’s revolutionary moment was systematically extinguished by governmental authoritarianism and monitoring
- Hong Kong’s prolonged resistance was ultimately suppressed through security legislation and military presence