BOOKS

PROJECTS
Shadows and the Silent Majority
2024-2025



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.  
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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.



MATTHEW CONNORS
News
Book Launch & Signing
The Fulcrum / Seasons
422 Ord St., 2nd Floor, Los Angeles
Friday, May 8th, 8pm-10pm

Matthew Connors & Nicholas Muellner: Axes and Allegories
Talk & Signing
LA Art Book Fair, Los Angeles
Friday, May 8 at 6pm

The Axe Will Survive the Master Book Release
April 30, 2026


BioMatthew Connors is an artist whose commitment to the medium of photography has been propelled by the revelatory potential of the public sphere. Rooted in specific currents of history, his bodies of work create a new visual encyclopedia of forms, portraits, symbols, and residues that emerge from protest movements, war, and oppressive systems of governance. His lyrical yet methodical approach resonates with political documentary and street photography, but continually challenges and transforms these categories.

His photographs have been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma, the MFA Boston, and DOX Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague. His first monograph Fire in Cairo (SPBH Editions, 2015) was awarded the ICP Infinity Award for best artist book in 2016. He has also been awarded the Abigail Cohen Rome Prize, a Headlands Center for the Arts Residency, two MacDowell Colony Fellowships, the Lightwork Artist-in-Residence Fellowship, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts Fellowship. 

Connors earned a BA in English Literature from the University of Chicago and a MFA in Photography from Yale University. He has taught in the Image Text Ithaca MFA Program, the Yale University MFA Program, and in the Photography Department at the Massachusetts College of Art & Design where he has been a professor since 2004.   


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©  Matthew Connors 2026