The Axe Will Survive the Master

The culminating volume in a celebrated trilogy that began withGeneral Assembly (2012) and Fire in Cairo (2015), the latter ofwhich won the ICP Infinity AwardThis landmark project spans twelve years of photographymade in sites of historical transformation – Ukraine, NorthKorea, Hong Kong, Egypt, and the United States – offeringan unconventional meditation on power and resistance at amoment when authoritarianism is on the rise globallyMatthew Connors is Professor and Chair of Photography at theMassachusetts College of Art and Design and was featured in‘Being: New Photography 2018’ at MoMAThe Axe Will Survive the Master is an oblique record of life on a faltering planet.Created over twelve years and across continents, Matthew Connors’s photographstrace the contours of an era shaped by confrontations with authoritarian power.From the Arab Spring to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Connors traverses scenesof global upheaval marked by disintegrating social contracts, political violence, andthe lingering reverberations of the Cold War.Bringing together photographs made between 2013 and 2025, this volumeconcludes a trilogy – following General Assembly (2013) and Fire in Cairo (2015)– meditating on power, resistance, and the fragile fate of democratic ideals. Hisimages move between the geopolitical and the intimate, drawn as much from thefabric of daily life as from the front lines of history. They depict a world definedby conflict and uncertainty, yet charged with beauty, threat, and consequence.Connors distils this vast, long-term observation into a single, hauntingsequence, forming a work that asks how images can bear witness to fracture andendurance. The Axe Will Survive the Master stands as the culmination of a majorbody of work: a lyrical reflection on sur