MATTHEW CONNORS

Shadows and the Silent Majority
2024-2025

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.

The Axe Will Survive the Master
2013-2025

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.

Unanimous Desires
2013-2016

Unanimous Desires is a photographic speculation about the conditions of existence in North Korea. Despite heavy restrictions on travel, Connors visited the reclusive nation on five government-organized tours between 2013 and 2016.

The Poetics
2017

In July of 2017, photographer Matthew Connors and novelist Lucy Ives embarked on a strange project: to remove and catalog all the contents of Connors's car, a 1992 Volvo 240 station wagon.

Fire in Cairo
2013

Fire in Cairo emerged from Egypt as an oblique and fragmentary document of revolutionary struggle. The work charts Connors’ uneasy engagement with the political turmoil that gripped the nation during its rapidly unfolding history.

General Assembly
2011-2012

The collective power of public assembly is one of the most effective instruments of opposition at the core of every protest movement. In the wake of economic calamity, these protesters and activists congregated at the doorstep of New York City's financial institutions to challenge the power of global capital and contemplate the contours of alternative systems.

Tenuous Republics
2003-2011

Matthew Connors presents apparently straightforward narratives of people moving through public spaces. Yet hidden in the work are questions: What is the dynamic of a city? And how can photography reveal this? The cities in his work are real places—Hong Kong, New York, Reykjavik—with real inhabitants, but his photographs depict fictional encounters in anonymous post-industrial cityscapes.