Source: anticapitalist musings
Resistance is a stark, tender, and unflinching record of a century of British protest, where the power of black-and-white photography turns acts of defiance into collective memory.
March is always a funny time to visit the coast in Britain. Everything’s half-asleep. Shops, bars, and restaurants are still brushing off the cobwebs, readying themselves for the new season. So it’s a strange mix—half-open, half-shut. Margate, for all its aspirations to be the new hub of an out-of-London art scene, still feels caught between bohemia and uncertainty. We passed the Tracey Emin studios, and there are galleries of all sizes—white cubes, back rooms, corners above cafés—but the whole enterprise feels precarious. At £900 a month for a one- or two-bed flat or terrace, it’s not hard to imagine how stretched things become for anyone whose income depends on the weather or the tourist calendar.
The March sun caught the edge of the sea as I arrived, the Turner Contemporary perched like a glass sentinel on the Kent coast, its austerity softened by the light. Inside, McQueen’s Resistance offers a century of protest in black and white, the camera, always watching, always watched. Not so much a chronology as a confrontation: between past and present, image and gaze, state and street. It felt right to see these photographs here, far from the capital’s closed circuits of culture and power.
Before you reach the photographs, you’re confronted by Hot Spot, Mona Hatoum’s steel globe burning with red neon light. It stands in front of a window looking out to sea—coastline meeting coastline, border meeting border. The globe tilts at 23.5 degrees, just like the Earth itself, but any naturalism ends there. This is a planet in permanent crisis. The continents fizz with violent energy, the cage-like frame crackles like a warning. Hatoum, born in Beirut to a Palestinian family and exiled in London since 1975, has always worked in the space between forced migration and global systems of control. Here, she offers no safe territory. The entire globe is a hot spot, of war, of warming, of walls. That it’s placed here, looking out over rising sea levels, only sharpens the point. You step into Resistance already reminded of what we’re up against.
Every image in the exhibition is black and white, not for aesthetic effect but because the medium demands it. This is the form in which these moments would have first been seen, on the front pages of broadsheets, in the margins of newsletters, taped to walls and passed hand to hand. Before colour printing became standard, black and white wasn’t a choice but a constraint. McQueen honours that constraint, and something of the urgency it carried. Each photo is modest in scale, tightly framed, insistently human. They make you lean in.
This is protest before social media. There are no phone cameras here, no selfies, no instantly viral images. Most of the photographs would once have been taken by professionals—press photographers, photojournalists, or amateurs with training and intent. These are the images that made it through the darkroom and into circulation, not to rack up likes, but to move minds. It is a reminder of a slower kind of visibility, where the image had to work harder, and often did.
Aside from a few familiar names—Tish Murtha, whose fierce and empathetic eye is rightly gaining wider recognition (there’s an excellent documentary, Tish, that honours her work), Steve Conlan, who captured the raw disorder of the Poll Tax riots, and Martin Jenkinson, the NUM’s unofficial official lens during the miners’ strike—many of the photographers here are less well known to me. Some are credited with only a single image, rather than a body of work. And that feels apt. This exhibition doesn’t elevate the photographer as auteur. The emphasis is on the image itself, what it captures, what it transmits, and what it demands of us. The act of seeing, not the status of the seer.
One of the most arresting sequences comes from Ireland. The images, by photographer Peter Marlow, were taken inside the Maze prison, not by Marlow himself, but by someone who smuggled his camera in. That alone says something about access, control, and the politics of visibility. One photo shows a Republican prisoner mid-protest, blurred, filthy, his body suspended in that uncanny combination of motion and stillness. He is taking part in the “dirty protest”, refusing to wear the uniform of the criminal. These men were not criminals—they were political prisoners, military prisoners, treated by the British state as common offenders in an attempt to erase the political content of their struggle.
The judder of the image—the odd framing, the grain—comes from the conditions under which it was taken. And yet despite all this, or perhaps because of it, the figure appears almost religious—Christ-like even. There’s something iconographic in his posture, his suffering formalised by the frame. Facing this, in eerie counterpoint, is a photograph of a prison officer looking through a narrow slit, watching, patrolling, recording. This is what the exhibition does so well: it holds together the violence of state power with the intimacy of resistance. This is the logic of surveillance, and the counter-logic of refusal. Us and them. Looking and being looked at.
The most striking photographs are not necessarily the most violent. A haunting image of three suffragettes in the dock, taken with a pinhole camera hidden by a journalist, shows each woman resting her head in her hand. Not one looks out at us. They are turned inward, exhausted, maybe resigned. It’s a photograph that demands time, it does not offer a heroine. And then, in contrast, another image: Mary Kenny being dragged by police, her face turned directly to the lens, grinning with unmistakable defiance. There’s joy in her resistance, and the camera catches it.
Elsewhere, a shot of men arrested under Britain’s anti-gay laws stares back with unflinching clarity. The Stop Clause 28 demonstrations, too, are frozen mid-chant, a mass of faces pressing against the frame. It’s impossible not to think of what was lost—of lives curtailed and communities brutalised. And yet here they are, still present, still insisting.
Then there is Cable Street. The counter-demonstrators, Jewish dockers, Irish workers, communists, trade unionists, facing down the British Union of Fascists. Not in abstraction, but in cobblestones, clenched fists, mounted police. The Poll Tax riots are here too, from the other end of the twentieth century: bodies surging past Trafalgar Square, placards held high, that familiar choreography of defiance and disorder. These images still carry the charge of their moment.
But it’s not all confrontation. What also comes through, insistently, is comradeship, love, even. The images from Greenham Common, where women campaigned against the deployment of US cruise missiles, radiate a kind of collective care. You see women arm in arm, gathered round fires, laughing, marching, building a life outside the logic of militarism. The road protests too, against bypasses at Twyford Down and Newbury, show another kind of resistance: communal, messy, rooted. Many of the protestors lived alternative lives in the margins, and brought their children, their dogs, their kitchens. The photographs capture more than opposition—they document tenderness, cooperation, the attempt to live otherwise.
What’s striking is the sheer range of resistance on display. This is an exhibition that includes everything from the right to roam walks and the campaign for disabled people’s rights to the Grunwick print workers’ strike, led by mostly Indian women defying both factory bosses and the official labour movement. The miners’ strike of 1984–85 is present too—pickets, police lines, kitchen tables, grief. The long, drawn-out struggle is caught in fragments, but the scale of it still presses through. We see the Battle of Lewisham in 1977, when anti-fascists drove the National Front off the streets, and we glimpse the texture of community resistance at Notting Hill—not the carnival, but the campaigns against racist policing and housing. There are images from the docks on Teesside too, a reminder that class struggle never belonged solely to the capital. Again and again, McQueen returns us to the bodies in motion, the ordinary people in extraordinary moments, the flashpoints and the forgotten ones alike.
Two photographs from 2003 centre on Brian Haw, the lone peace protestor who camped outside the House of Commons for nearly a decade. For those of us protesting the Iraq War in that period, he was a permanent fixture—a reminder, even in our disillusion, that someone was always there, bearing witness. These photos don’t try to elevate him; they simply record him. That’s enough.
What McQueen has done is more than curate. He has framed a political history of Britain through the lens of its resistance. The state is present mostly in silhouette, in the uniformed line, the barbed wire fence, the truncheon in mid-swing. The protagonists are the people, not as victims but as agents: marching, shouting, laughing, running, kissing.
That the show ends in 2003 is a provocation in itself. The anti-Iraq War march, still the largest in British history, is often remembered in tones of failure. But McQueen doesn’t moralise. He lets the images do the talking. And they talk loudly.
Then there is Cable Street. The counter-demonstrators, Jewish dockers, Irish workers, communists, trade unionists, facing down the British Union of Fascists. Not in abstraction, but in cobblestones, clenched fists, mounted police. The Poll Tax riots are here too, from the other end of the twentieth century: bodies surging past Trafalgar Square, placards held high, that familiar choreography of defiance and disorder. These images still carry the charge of their moment.
But it’s not all confrontation. What also comes through, insistently, is comradeship, love, even. The images from Greenham Common, where women campaigned against the deployment of US cruise missiles, radiate a kind of collective care. You see women arm in arm, gathered round fires, laughing, marching, building a life outside the logic of militarism. The road protests too, against bypasses at Twyford Down and Newbury, show another kind of resistance: communal, messy, rooted. Many of the protestors lived alternative lives in the margins, and brought their children, their dogs, their kitchens. The photographs capture more than opposition—they document tenderness, cooperation, the attempt to live otherwise.
What’s striking is the sheer range of resistance on display. This is an exhibition that includes everything from the right to roam walks and the campaign for disabled people’s rights to the Grunwick print workers’ strike, led by mostly Indian women defying both factory bosses and the official labour movement. The miners’ strike of 1984–85 is present too—pickets, police lines, kitchen tables, grief. The long, drawn-out struggle is caught in fragments, but the scale of it still presses through. We see the Battle of Lewisham in 1977, when anti-fascists drove the National Front off the streets, and we glimpse the texture of community resistance at Notting Hill—not the carnival, but the campaigns against racist policing and housing. There are images from the docks on Teesside too, a reminder that class struggle never belonged solely to the capital. Again and again, McQueen returns us to the bodies in motion, the ordinary people in extraordinary moments, the flashpoints and the forgotten ones alike.
Two photographs from 2003 centre on Brian Haw, the lone peace protestor who camped outside the House of Commons for nearly a decade. For those of us protesting the Iraq War in that period, he was a permanent fixture—a reminder, even in our disillusion, that someone was always there, bearing witness. These photos don’t try to elevate him; they simply record him. That’s enough.
What McQueen has done is more than curate. He has framed a political history of Britain through the lens of its resistance. The state is present mostly in silhouette, in the uniformed line, the barbed wire fence, the truncheon in mid-swing. The protagonists are the people, not as victims but as agents: marching, shouting, laughing, running, kissing.
That the show ends in 2003 is a provocation in itself. The anti-Iraq War march, still the largest in British history, is often remembered in tones of failure. But McQueen doesn’t moralise. He lets the images do the talking. And they talk loudly.
Three things stayed with me as I stepped back out into the sunshine: the clarity of those faces; the stubbornness of their joy; and the way history can be made legible not through theory, but through the photograph’s precise, unyielding frame.
NB Featured image: Anti-racists gather to block route of National Front demonstration New Cross Road London August 1977