Photographs and text by Matthew Connors
Design by Brian Paul Lamotte
MACK/SPBH Editions, London, 2026
Hardcover, lithography, 208 pages, 7.9 x 10 in.

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The 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 photographs trace the contours of an era shaped by confrontations with authoritarian power. From the Arab Spring to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Connors traverses scenes of global upheaval marked by disintegrating social contracts, political violence, and the lingering reverberations of the Cold War.

Bringing together photographs made between 2013 and 2025, this volume concludes a trilogy – following General Assembly (2013) and Fire in Cairo(2015) – meditating on power, resistance, and the fragile fate of democratic ideals. His images move between the geopolitical and the intimate, drawn as much from the fabric of daily life as from the front lines of history. They depict a world defined by conflict and uncertainty, yet charged with beauty, threat, and consequence.

Connors distils this vast, long-term observation into a single, haunting sequence, forming a work that asks how images can bear witness to fracture and endurance. The Axe Will Survive the Master stands as the culmination of a major body of work: a lyrical reflection on survival, sovereignty, and the political forces that shape individual experience.

Shadows and the Silent Majority is a series of photographs made over the course of a year in Rome. The pictures depict fictional encounters in the city's public spaces—figures caught in states of absorption, withdrawal, and inadvertent convergences—against the backdrop of the city’s densely layered architecture. By compressing multiple instants into unified compositions, Connors builds images that function less as documents than as analogs of the psychological reality of moving through a city. 

What emerges are scenes that feel witnessed rather than constructed—moments dense with the tension between solitude and proximity that defines urban experience. Rome becomes more than a setting; it is an active participant, a palimpsest of social organization that governs and estranges the bodies within it. The weight of its accumulated histories persist as undercurrents to the most fleeting interactions. The project extends a career-long engagement with the ways environments shape existence, but turns from the urgency of political crisis toward the quieter, more elusive currents of alienation and accident that underlie everyday life.

The 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 photographs trace the contours of an era shaped by confrontations with authoritarian power. From the Arab Spring to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Connors traverses scenes of global upheaval marked by disintegrating social contracts, political violence, and the lingering reverberations of the Cold War.

Bringing together photographs made between 2013 and 2025, this volume concludes a trilogy – following General Assembly (2013) and Fire in Cairo (2015) – meditating on power, resistance, and the fragile fate of democratic ideals. His images move between the geopolitical and the intimate, drawn as much from the fabric of daily life as from the front lines of history. They depict a world defined by conflict and uncertainty, yet charged with beauty, threat, and consequence.

Connors distills this vast, long-term observation into a single, haunting sequence, forming a work that asks how images can bear witness to fracture and endurance. The Axe Will Survive the Master stands as the culmination of a major body of work: a lyrical reflection on survival, sovereignty, and the political forces that shape individual experience.


Book

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The Axe Will Survive the Master, MACK/SPBH Editions, 2026