Matthew Connors' new photo book, *The Axe Will Survive the Master*, compiles 12 years of protest photography from Hong Kong, Cairo, New York, Kyiv, North Korea, and beyond. Published by MACK Books, the work weaves together images from the Occupy movement, the Egyptian revolution, Hong Kong's pro-democracy protests, the war in Ukraine, and other confrontations with authoritarian power, dissolving geographic boundaries into a single sequence drawn from an archive of 200,000 images.
The book matters because it offers a visual record of a global era defined by systemic political struggle, tracing an escalatory pattern from collective assembly to totalitarian control and war. Connors frames the work as a search for 'glimmers' of alternative possibilities, referencing Mark Fisher's *Capitalist Realism*, and challenges viewers to see these protests as interconnected rather than isolated events. It completes a trilogy that began with *General Assembly* (2013) and *Fire in Cairo* (2015), deepening the conversation about photography's role in documenting political realities.