Image from The Axe Will Survive the Master © Matthew Connors.
The third in a trilogy of photobooks, collating images made over 12 years, Matthew Connors’ latest work asks demanding questions of a world facing violence and uncertainty
“The axe is always there, ready. The master’s axe… survives everything. Don’t ever forget it.” These words were spoken by a former executioner for the NKVD (the Soviet secret police) and recorded by Svetlana Alexievich in Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, her epic oral history on the collapse of the USSR. Matthew Connors evokes the sentiment for something even more ambitious; a photographic insight into our contemporary world, made over 12 years in cities such as Bangkok, Cairo, Chernobyl, Hong Kong, Kyiv, Naples, Pyongyang, Varanasi and Washington DC.
There is a danger that such a sprawling topic can dissipate into nothing – if something is about everything is it about anything? – but Connors keeps the narrative tight. The opening pages focus on flat planes and ads and images in public space, the narrative then expands out to scenes of violence and repression. The book is divided into chapters such as ‘Maculate Origins’ (maculate is the opposite of immaculate) or ‘A Caucus of Shadows’. It is often hard to judge where Connors has taken particular shots, suggesting that the many locations have much in common; globalisation has flattened differences between cultures, the same clothes, technology and rising authoritarianism mapping onto everywhere.
It is often hard to judge where Connors has taken particular shots, suggesting that the many locations have much in common
The book cover is intriguing, depicting glass smashed into a circle that also suggests a camera lens; there is maybe a metacriticism at work here, in which the camera is part of the problem. The photographs show a reality fracturing partly because of images, billboards and reflections intersecting with flat planes and fragments of views; meanwhile laser pointers and masks document attempts to evade surveillance. Connors’ text, The Knotted Alliance, is written in first-person plural (‘we’) and describes a petition annotated and updated by many hands; it refers to a group effort. There is something interesting going on around the group versus the individual, the ability to reach a consensus, or – as in Alexievich’s case – to gather many voices.
Where Connors’ images fit into that is moot. Does his assemblage of scenes suggest a sense of the polyvocal? Or the organising perspective of his particular vision of things? Does the camera allow us to think of the individual point of view or – as Donna Haraway had it – encourage a “god trick” in which everything is apparently seen from nowhere? Conclusions are not easy to draw, but this book is asking the big questions, and making a case for their urgency.
The Axe Will Survive the Master by Matthew Connors is published by SPBH Editions/MACK, priced £50.