by Luca Fiore
“If you shoot a German, he screams in German. But them… they screamed in Russian… As if they were our own people… We were all covered in blood… we wiped our hands in their hair.” And then, almost as consolation: “The axe is always there, ready. The master’s axe… survives everything. Don’t ever forget it.” The speaker is a former NKVD executioner, one of those who during the Stalinist years shot political prisoners on an industrial scale. Matthew Connors found this testimony in the pages of Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time — the book that earned the Belarusian writer the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015 — and from it drew the title of a work he had been building for twelve years. The Axe Will Survive the Master (MACK/SPBH, 2026) has just been published: 208 pages, ten countries, four continents. The final chapter of a trilogy begun with General Assembly (2013) and Fire in Cairo (SPBH Editions, 2015), winner of the ICP Infinity Award for best artist book in 2016.
Connors was born in 1976 in Port Washington, New York. He studied English literature at the University of Chicago, then photography at Yale. He has taught at the Massachusetts College of Art & Design in Boston since 2004. He spent 2024–2025 at the American Academy in Rome as a Rome Prize Fellow: it was there, in the studios on the Janiculum Hill, that The Axe Will Survive the Master took its final form — two thousand proof prints drawn from an archive of two hundred thousand photographs, pinned to the walls and rearranged for months until the right sequence was found.
The book was born, he says, “from the ashes of four other books” — projects cultivated in parallel and imagined as separate: one on North Korea, where he gained entry five times between 2013 and 2016; one on Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement; one on the “paroxysms of dissent” in America during the Trump eras; one on Ukraine, where he traveled in the weeks following the Russian invasion of February 2022, moving through territories evacuated by Russian forces. “There was something about that that started to feel a little bit too predictable and static, and wasn’t suggesting the possibility of anything new about those situations.” So he fused the four bodies of work, adding photographs from Cuba, Varanasi, Naples, Bangkok, Cappadocia, and Rome — images that hadn’t fit into any of the original frameworks but found their place in the editing. “These are not isolated incidents,” the artist says. “They are all responding to very similar and interconnected authoritarian forces. There was value in stepping back and thinking about the broader picture of what was happening globally.”
Connors does not consider himself a photojournalist. He holds firmly to this distinction, while acknowledging that his work superficially resembles it. “Journalism is really trying to answer questions, trying to settle the facts of a certain situation. I’m trying to pose more questions and ambiguity, and complicate the ways in which we understand these currents of history. Journalism tries to eliminate ambiguity.” The model he has in mind is literary realism — a tradition that constructs worlds that seem real while being entirely constructed. “It’s not fantasy, it’s not sci-fi. But it’s not documentation either. I take authorial, poetic liberties, to shift pictures slightly to make them conform to the way I was seeing those situations.”
That Alexievich should be the point of arrival is, in retrospect, unsurprising. She too uses the tools of journalism — the interview, direct testimony, the accumulation of voices — to build literature. She too rejects reportage as an adequate form and transforms the document into something with the consistency of a choral novel. The title drawn from her book is not a decorative citation. It is a declaration of method, one that carries with it an echo of Audre Lorde: “you can’t use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house.” The axe is not only the mechanism of power perpetuating itself — it is also the question of which tools are legitimate for dismantling it.
“There are no captions in the book. I didn’t want them to necessarily shape the response. People who are well versed in these situations can probably understand where most of the pictures are taken. Others will have to do without the safety net of context.” It is a deliberate subtraction: the image must stand alone, or fall. “I make no claims to being a neutral chronicler. I’m making metaphorical speculations about these situations that can resonate beyond the immediate.”
Yet it is difficult to describe what one actually sees in Connors’s photographs. Enigmatic graffiti on walls along the street. Post-it notes stuck to a concrete wall. A cluster of pigeons crowding into a wheelbarrow in the snow. Yellow sheets of paper flying through the air in front of a district of mirrored towers. Cracked crystals refracting colored light. A kitchen blackened by fire. A protester in a gas mask. A young man having milk poured over his face. Smoke grenades. The head of a skinned rabbit. Flames. Smoke. The action is almost never depicted. These are always peripheral images — the margins of events, not their center. A book that moves through the Arab Spring, Hong Kong, Ukraine and never shows what we would expect to see.
The arc that emerged is narrative without being chronological: at the beginning surfaces are obscured, things hidden. At the center a detonation — conflict at its peak. Then the residues, the traces violence leaves in landscape and bodies. And finally the coda: photographs of Hong Kong protesters projecting blue and green laser beams onto building facades. “Those images felt like a kind of counterpoint to the last picture before the story: a shot taken in North Korea, a floodlight moving up, which echoes Albert Speer’s Cathedral of Light in Nuremberg — a very ideological, fascist control of light. The Hong Kong lasers are the opposite: collective drawing, collective creative activity as a way forward. A form of hope.”
Inside the book there is also a work of fiction written by Connors. “Writing functions like the editing of images. It’s a verbal collage: key phrases made to collide in unexpected ways, then smoothed until they flow like a story.” The table of contents, too, does not correspond to physical sections of the sequence — it is, as Connors puts it, a set of “atmospheric anchors”: it creates the feeling of structure without being one. The titles demonstrate this: Box of Savage Boredom, Salami Tactics, White Terror, A New Cathedral. A hybrid of political vocabulary and surrealist invention.
The book began taking shape in the autumn of 2024, in the immediate aftermath of the American elections. “I think it might be a darker book than it might have been otherwise. That election really impacted my state of mind,” he adds. “I let go of thinking of the book as being a single argument. I changed a lot as well — I’ve gone through all these different waves of idealism and disillusionment. There’s a cascading complexity to understanding these situations, and I think that’s part of what I’m hoping the impact of the book will be.” It is a political statement. But also something else.
The result is a book that does not describe events but recreates an atmosphere — that diffuse, underground tension that over the last twenty years has run beneath the surface across very different latitudes without ever finding a precise name. One recognizes it immediately. And those willing to engage fully, down to the existential dimension, will find something more than a political document.
There is a quotation from Robert Adams that Connors says keeps running through his head. “Why is form beautiful? Because, I think, it helps us confront our worst fear, the suspicion that life may be chaos and that therefore our suffering is without meaning… The beauty of art, of course, leads to no final doctrine.” This is not nihilism. It is exactly the opposite: it is that fear — that nothing has meaning, not even the struggle — that makes form necessary. And therefore the work. And therefore continuing, without final doctrine.
Domani, May 22, 2026
