Collective action, marches, road closures and street clashes. Signs emblazoned, “No arms for Apartheid,” “Smash racism,” “Stop the Nazis,” “Freedom for Palestine,” “Equal pay now.”
Walking through “Resistance: How Protest Shaped Britain and Photography Shaped Protest,” curated by the artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen, you might look at the elegantly hung selection of nearly 200 black-and-white photographs spanning a century and think: Some things never change.
The exhibition, on view through June 1 at Turner Contemporary, in Margate, England, is the product of four years’ research by McQueen in archives across Britain and abroad. It begins with the suffragists of the early 20th century, who campaigned for women’s enfranchisement and convened some of the largest demonstrations ever seen in the country, and ends with the hundreds of thousands who marched, fruitlessly, against the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Resistance is not always successful, change is incremental, the struggle is long.
Depending on where you’re from, your age and political inclinations, the exhibition will offer more and less familiar movements, but each is rooted in democracy and the advance of human rights by peaceful protest (or largely peaceful — the “Suffragettes” also used means including homemade bombs, acid attacks, art vandalism and burning down churches).
Under McQueen’s keen eye, all these movements are connected in a lineage of resistance to oppression, whether on the grounds of gender, race, ability, class or sexual orientation, or flowing from the human inclination to destroy the earth.
Images come from high and low sources: Artists and photojournalists mingle with anonymous photographers, surveillance camera operations, undercover volunteers and community activists. Because the news media has historically been more supportive of the state than it has been of the state’s detractors, many of the photographs on display were first seen in pamphlets, fliers and specialist magazines, rather than in newspapers. But even haphazard shots can be artfully framed.
A 1908 image by Arthur Barrett, a photographer for the Daily Mirror newspaper, shows a trio of feminist activists being sentenced in court, where cameras were prohibited. He hid his apparatus under a top hat, cut a hole for the lens, and coughed to cover the sound of the shutter. The women look bored out of their minds, like they couldn’t care less about the charges they faced for handing out “inflammatory handbills.”
In the late 1940s, unnamed photographers infiltrated a group called the Union Movement to record aspiring fascists meeting in public and in private. One 1948 image shows a long line of men and one woman, sinister and starkly lit against the night by the camera’s flash as they wait outside a house to join up.
The Magnum photographer Peter Marlow persuaded an unidentified person to smuggle a camera into the Maze prison in Belfast in the late 1970s and early ’80s. (It was most likely a doctor or lawyer, who wouldn’t have been searched.) That anonymous person took “Irish Republican Prisoner During the ‘Dirty Protest’ at Maze Prison,” a photograph that shows a man, thin and shirtless, like an apparition against his cell wall, which is smeared with feces. The image is blurred, as if taken hastily.
This is one of a few gestures toward McQueen’s wider practice throughout the show. The so-called dirty protesters at the Maze prison were the subject of his harrowing 2008 film “Hunger,” about the Irish Republican Army member Bobby Sands, who died there on the 66th day of a hunger strike. Another section of photographs shows a group of anti-apartheid activists protesting the Soweto uprising of 1976 outside the Mangrove restaurant in London, the subject of the first episode in McQueen’s brilliant 2020 mini-series “Small Axe.”
But the show is not all violence and imprisonment, marching and fury; joy is paramount to resistance, McQueen also seems to say. A 1959 photograph of the Caribbean Carnival in London, an event that started as a defiant celebration in the face of racist violence, shows a couple performing gravity-defying dance moves. Raissa Page’s 1983 “Dancing on the Silos at Dawn” captures dozens of protesters from the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, a campaign for nuclear disarmament, breaking into a military base they opposed. Hands joined, they form a huge circle, dark figures swaying in the morning light.
And then there’s the simple joy of beholding huge groups of people united in purpose, be it a 1936 “hunger march” against mass unemployment, the rapt 1945 audience of the Fifth Pan-African Conference, a 1985 union meeting of miners voting to continue their strike or huge peace demonstrations in 1936, 1968 and 2003.
The framework of the exhibition, with its focus on a specific period before the ascent of digital photography, implicitly asks what’s next, now that the internet and social media have changed the medium so radically.
More interesting to me is the galvanizing evidence that, if resistance knows anything, it’s continuity. To participate in collective organizing is to believe that change, even when it seems impossible, will arrive. It is to be hopeful in hopeless times.
Resistance
Through June 1 at Turner Contemporary, in Margate, England; turnercontemporary.org.
