The Axe Will Survive the Master

The culminating volume in a celebrated trilogy that began with General Assembly (2012) and Fire in Cairo (2015), the latter of which won the ICP Infinity Award This landmark project spans twelve years of photography made in sites of historical transformation – Ukraine, North Korea, Hong Kong, Egypt, and the United States – offering an unconventional meditation on power and resistance at a moment when authoritarianism is on the rise globally Matthew Connors is Professor and Chair of Photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and was featured in ‘Being: New Photography 2018’ at MoMA 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 sur