Matthew Connors' 'The Axe Will Survive the Master' Traces Global Protests

Matthew Connors' photobook 'The Axe Will Survive the Master,' published by MACK Books, distills 12 years of work across multiple continents, focusing on protests in America, Hong Kong's pro-democracy movement, and the war in Ukraine, with additional images from Egypt, North Korea, and Cuba. The book completes a trilogy that began with 'General Assembly' (2013) and 'Fire in Cairo' (2015), but unlike those single-context works, it weaves multiple situations into a single sequence charting an escalatory pattern from collective assembly to totalitarian control and war. Connors drew from an archive of 200,000 images, arranging them without captions or geographic markers to emphasize systemic interconnectedness. The title, borrowed from Svetlana Alexievich's 'Secondhand Time,' alludes to authoritarian oppression's corruption of society. The book includes fiction written by Connors rather than documentary essays. It ends on a hopeful note with images of Hong Kong protesters' laser lights against the Central Government Complex, framed as a counterpoint to Albert Speer's Cathedral of Light.