Matthew Connors' new photo book, The Axe Will Survive the Master, distills 12 years of work across multiple continents, capturing the global wave of confrontations with authoritarian power. From Hong Kong to Cairo, New York to Kyiv, the world is depicted in a state of upheaval, where collective assembly, revolutionary upheaval, and outright war define an era.
A Trilogy of Resistance
Connors describes this book as the completion of a trilogy that began with General Assembly (2013) and Fire in Cairo (2015). Where earlier works focused on single contexts—the Occupy movement and the Egyptian revolution—this new volume weaves multiple situations into a single sequence. It charts an escalatory pattern: collective assembly, revolutionary upheaval, totalitarian control, surveillance repression, and war. Each context represents a different register of the same fundamental struggle.
Glimmers of Hope
Underlying these contexts is a condition Mark Fisher described in Capitalist Realism—the sense that the existing order has foreclosed our capacity to imagine alternatives. Connors sought those glimmers where the cancellation of the future was momentarily breached. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again. His images capture moments of possibility amid despair.
From Archive to Narrative
The book emerged from the ashes of several other projects, each rooted in a specific geography: Ukraine, America, Hong Kong, North Korea. Connors had enough material for a book on each, but the results felt flat. He sensed something more interesting in thinking about his vantage point across all these contexts. Drawing from an archive of 200,000 images, he created a single sequence that dissolves geographic boundaries. Images from across the world arrive without caption or marker, resisting organization into separate categories. The political forces depicted aren't geographically bounded; they are systemic and interconnected.
Showing Up with Openness
Connors' approach is rooted in simply showing up with openness and humility. He is not an expert in geopolitics or organized dissent; he tries to find the ideas in his encounters. He works without assistants, fixers, or drivers, and does not seek special access. Sometimes he works with volunteer groups to get oriented, but he spends as much time as possible wandering alone to sense the rhythm of a place. This affords time to make mistakes and calibrate himself to emerging ruptures in the status quo.
Speaking Nearby, Not About
Connors photographed these events to better understand them, but he does not expect the pictures to serve as explanations. Devoid of documentary scaffolding—captions, essays—the book instead 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. This positions the pictures without explanation. Connors describes it as speaking not about, but speaking nearby.
The Title's Meaning
The title The Axe Will Survive the Master comes from Svetlana Alexievich's Secondhand Time. It is a phrase spoken by a former Soviet security officer involved in executing political prisoners, alluding 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 must attend to that deeper degradation rather than indulging in our obsession with charismatic tyrants.
Hope in Collective Creativity
The work encapsulates changes in the world and in Connors himself. Over 13 years, he has ridden multiple waves of idealism and disillusionment. The book reflects competing feelings but ends on a hopeful note. The coda is a run of images showing laser lights Hong Kong protesters shone against a building in the Central Government Complex. Connors 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.
