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In this 1936 photo by Eddie Worth, an anti-fascist demonstrator is arrested during the Battle of Cable Street in London. Alamy
“Resistance has been my life, and it continues to be,” Steve McQueen, the renowned British film director, writes in the Guardian.
He recalls his first encounter with resistance at 9 years old, when he attended a facility called a “Saturday school” that had been created to counteract the effects of a racially discriminatory school system. He didn’t comprehend the larger context of Britain’s “subnormal schools” at the time, but he recalls the feelings of “solidarity and camaraderie” vividly.
McQueen, who directed the Oscar-winning film 12 Years a Slave (2013), has now concentrated these feelings, memories and politics into a sweeping exhibition of a century’s worth of photography.
Installation
"Resistance" at Turner Contemporary in Margate, England Above Ground Studio / Turner Contemporary
Titled “Resistance,” the show stretches from the United Kingdom’s suffrage movement in 1903 to its largest demonstrations against the Iraq war in 2003. It is on view at Turner Contemporary, an art gallery in southeast England, through this summer.
McQueen amassed the exhibition’s nearly 200 black-and-white images through four years of archival research, according to the New York Times’ Emily LaBarge. In the gallery, the small photos hang in stark black frames, tracing resistance to oppression, discrimination and inequality over 100 years.
“‘Resistance’ is really a continuation of Steve’s dedication to shining a light on untold stories,” Clarrie Wallis, the director of Turner Contemporary and McQueen’s co-curator, tells Wallpaper’s Millen Brown-Ewens. “We sought images that expressed how photographers both captured and piloted moments that molded modern Britain.”
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Environmentalists protesting a proposed highway route in 1996 Andrew Testa
The photographers on view include Christina Broom, a pioneering British photojournalist, and Vanley Burke, a British-Jamaican photographer whose work documents the Afro-Caribbean community in Britain. The exhibition also features plenty of images from unknown sources and photographers, including “surveillance camera operations, undercover volunteers and community activists,” according to the Times.
“Many grassroots photographers and community activists were using photography not just to document protest but also to shape their own narratives and build solidarity networks,” Wallis tells Wallpaper.
The show’s subtitle is “How protest shaped Britain and photography shaped protest.” Photography helped disperse news of protests across Britain and around the world, showing the public what protests (and protesters) looked like.
Annie Kenney
Police arrest Annie Kenney, a defiant cotton mill worker, socialist and suffragist, in 1913. Alamy
The exhibition “explores how people have challenged the status quo,” McQueen says to BBC News’ Stuart Maisner. It also shows how the forces of the status quo push back.
One 1913 image from an unknown photographer shows police arresting Annie Kenney, a socialist, suffragist and cotton mill worker in London. Her white dress and defiant smile stand out in a crowd of drab grayscale suits and uniforms.
A similar photo shows police on horseback arresting an anti-fascist demonstrator during the Battle of Cable Street in 1936, when crowds of protesters gathered to disrupt the British Union of Fascists’ planned march toward London’s largest Jewish community.
TV
A family watches union leader Arthur Scargill on TV in their home. Keith Pattison
“Social progress typically emerges from the margins,” Wallis tells Wallpaper. “Local communities identify problems and mobilize for change long before their concerns reach mainstream discourse.”
Later photos also capture that dynamic. In one 1971 photo, members of the Gay Liberation Front protest outside Bow Street Magistrates’ Court in London. In a 1984 image, a family watches Arthur Scargill, president of the National Union of Mineworkers, on television in their living room.
At the exhibition’s endpoint in 2003, social media and smartphones were poised to “irrevocably change our relationship with images, as well as the relationship between photographs and videos and truth,” writes the Guardian’s Adrian Searle in a review of the exhibition.
Carnival
At the Notting Hill Carnival in 1974, joy went hand in hand with resistance. Chris Miles
But McQueen maintains that protest is “especially urgent in today’s political climate,” according to BBC News.
As the photographs in “Resistance” show, protest takes many forms. While some images are tinged with anger, others are colored by joy, such as the photos of the defiant, lively 1959 Caribbean carnival in London organized by the journalist and activist Claudia Jones.
“Jones understood that communal celebration could be a powerful form of resistance—transforming moments of trauma into expressions of cultural pride,” Wallis tells Wallpaper.
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Eli Wizevich | | READ MORE
Eli Wizevich is a history correspondent for Smithsonian. He studied history at the University of Chicago and previously wrote for the El Paso Times.