Matthew Connors' new photo book, The Axe Will Survive the Master, distils 12 years of work across multiple continents, capturing protests in America, the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong, and the war in Ukraine. The book also includes images from Egypt, North Korea, Cuba, and other places where social contracts have been under duress. It is an oblique record of life on a faltering planet, tracing an era shaped by confrontations with authoritarian power. Published by MACK Books, the work weaves multiple situations into a single sequence, charting an escalatory pattern from collective assembly to revolutionary upheaval, totalitarian control, surveillance repression, and outright war.
A Trilogy Completed
Connors notes that this book completes a trilogy that began with General Assembly (2013) and Fire in Cairo (2015). Where earlier publications were rooted in single contexts—the Occupy movement and the Egyptian revolution—this one brings together diverse situations. Each context represents a different register of the same fundamental struggle.
Glimmers of Possibility
Underlying all these contexts is a condition Mark Fisher described in Capitalist Realism: the sense that the existing order has foreclosed our capacity to imagine alternatives. Fisher wrote that even glimmers of alternative political and economic possibilities can have a disproportionately great effect. Connors explains, 'From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again. I was searching for those glimmers; the places where the cancellation of the future was momentarily breached and another way of being came into view.'
From Multiple Projects to One
The book emerged from the ashes of several other projects Connors was building simultaneously, each rooted in a specific geography: Ukraine, America, Hong Kong, North Korea. He had enough material for a book on each, but the results felt flat and predictable. He began to sense there was something more interesting in thinking about his vantage point across all these contexts.
Dissolving Geographic Boundaries
The challenge was to bring together material from an archive of 200,000 images into a single sequence that dissolves geographic boundaries. Images from across the world arrive without caption or marker, resisting organisation into separate categories. The political forces the book depicts aren't geographically bounded; they are systemic and interconnected.
Photographing Political Realities
In each context, Connors set out to photograph political realities—what happens when governments and their citizens come into conflict. He also attempted to reckon with the role American foreign policy had in these dynamics abroad. It usually began with an obsession he couldn't shake, a sense that he needed to engage with unfolding events, fuelled by a mixture of anger, curiosity, and hope.
Showing Up with Humility
The starting point for Connors has always been to just show up with openness and humility. He is not an expert in geopolitics or organised dissent; he tries to find the ideas in his encounters. He works without assistants, fixers, or drivers, and does not seek special access or embedded arrangements. Sometimes he works for volunteer groups to get oriented, but he spends as much time as possible wandering alone to sense the rhythm of a place.
Beyond Explanation
Connors photographed these events to better understand them, though he does not expect the pictures to be a form of explanation to others. Devoid of documentary scaffolding—captions, essays—the book includes fiction he wrote. A short story in the first-person plural speaks from inside the condition the photographs have been circling: a collective hallucination with the texture of lived experience but no stable geography, positioning the pictures without explanation. He describes this as speaking not about, but speaking nearby.
The Title's Meaning
The title of the book is from Svetlana Alexievich's Secondhand Time, a phrase spoken by a former Soviet security officer involved in executing political prisoners. It alludes to how authoritarian oppression corrupts the fabric of society itself. Connors chose it to resist framing our predicament as simply a fight against any single leader or regime. To escape the endless struggle between survival and mastery, we would be better served attending to that deeper degradation than indulging in our obsession with charismatic tyrants.
A Hopeful Coda
The work encapsulates many changes in the world and in Connors himself. Since starting these images 13 years ago, he has ridden multiple waves of idealism and disillusionment. The book reflects many competing feelings, but he considers it to end on a hopeful note. The coda is a run of images showing laser lights Hong Kong protesters were shining against a building in the Central Government Complex. He sees this as a counterpoint to Albert Speer's monumental Cathedral of Light in Nuremberg, suggesting a path forward through spontaneous acts of collective creativity.
