Demonstration against the invasion of Iraq: courtesy Andrew Wiard
Jon Baldwin reviews an exhibition of photography at Turner Contemporary, Margate, until 1st June 2025
Resistance is conceived by artist and filmmaker, knighted in 2020, Sir Steve McQueen. It recently opened in Margate, Kent, and is a curation of powerful photographs chronicling and bearing witness to popular protest in the UK. It spans a turbulent century, from early faded images of suffragettes in 1903 to the anti-war protest of 2003 and cusp of the proliferation of camera-phones. The people are seen standing up for women’s rights, worker’s rights, queer rights, disabled rights, the environment, and standing against fascism, racism, post-imperialism, nuclear arms, and war. The photographs are exclusively black and white and include personal shots, press images, photojournalism, and pictures selected from archives and collections.
The classic iconography of an ignored UK mass is here. Angry young women, kids lined up on the dole, squatters, hunger and thirst strikers, dancers on missile silos, wheelchair-users, kiss-ins, joy, despair, body paint, raves, prams, marches, slogans, sit-downs, community, stewards, refugees, flying pickets, and all manner of agents of social change. Folk who felt they had no other option but to take to the streets and signal discontent.
Anti-nuclear protesters marching to Aldermaston, 1958: courtesy of Henry Grant Collection
In electronics, resistance is the opposition that a substance offers to the flow of electric current. In these images the people are the substance that oppose the flow of bigotry, exploitation, inhumanity, and injustice. The mise-en-scene comprises barbed wire, homemade banners, a murmuration over the Durham docks, barricades, sound systems, squaller, Molotov cocktails, mobilisation, tree villages, candlelit vigils, familiar places, forgotten sites, and the masses in their dignity and collective power.
Some individuals and events are singled out: Angela Y. Davis, Greenham Common, murder in Notting Hill, Emily Pankhurst in court, Oswald Mosley orating, Toxteth, Tony Benn in Trafalgar Square, Scargill on tv, murder in New Cross, Brian Haw, and Cable Street. All captured within the remarkable time freezing, gritty realism, lens of Paul Trevor, or lyricism of Tish Murtha, and others. Particularly poignant is the juxtaposition of the Jarrow Crusaders marching through Lavendon in 1936 and then a later image from 1981 with the People’s March for Jobs through Lavendon. The workers follow the same footsteps through the same village half a century apart.
Of course, the more prosaic, less photogenic, everyday acts of resistance are absent in the gallery. Such as planning, strategy, solidarity, canvassing, organising, leafleting, personal disobedience, belligerence, and the noble art of Bartleby’s ‘I would prefer not to’. Also absent are the middle- and professional-classes, who sought safety in the status quo during these times. No need for them to resist.
A recurring feature of the photographs is the presence of the repressive state apparatus. That is, the police, under their orders, kicking back against the people in the form of surveillance photos, mugshots, violence, and sheer presence. In several photos, policemen hugely outnumber the protestors. A 1907 shot shows suffragette Dora Thewlis arrested and flanked by two policemen. A single Cable Street anti-fascist demonstrator is shown being hastened away by ten policemen, seven of them on mounted horse. The racist march and subsequent Battle of Lewisham, 1977, has too many police to count. They are chaperoning banner-holders declaring, for instance, “National Front 1974 Coventry Branch.”
If there is a complaint about the exhibition, then it would be the uniformity of the images. All are rendered in largely the same size, are in the same frame, and with the same measure of white space. As an image from the Gallery website reveals:
Perhaps the sometimes-anarchic nature of resistance could have affected the arrangement? Perhaps there could have been some blow-ups, and dramatic enlargements. Some colour? Some photographs of graffiti? It is as if, against the premise of the exhibition, institutionalisation into the ‘art’ scene and gallery-world, has resulted in a banal, sterile, seriality of images that one must glance at briefly then move on to the next. No ethos of resistance, revolt, or revolution in the art-world or gallery space here. A nice comfortable middle- and professional-class arrangement, containment, and confinement in ordered, regimented space, of framed images of events that probably barely registered in the lives of many of the organisers and attendees. Boxed-in, compartmentalised, resistance from the lower-classes and others, now rendered safe to admire or see from a distance as “art”. Seen that, done it, what’s next. Oh, don’t forget your tote bag, postcards, homeware, and tat from the gift shop before exiting.
More significant is that despite the inclusion of disability rights images of resistance and protest, the eye-level in the gallery, and height of the images, remains that suited to the fully abled. The irony here is that a person in a wheelchair will not be able to fully access certain images. For instance, a photograph of wheelchaired protestors in front of the number 11 bus to Fulham Broadway blocking traffic in protest. Or a family in front of the Houses of Parliament protesting the government’s blocking of the Disabled Rights Bill on 11th March 1994, with a father in a wheelchair and a child on his lap holding a homemade placard which simply reads, “RIGHTS FOR DADDY.” This photo, at least, is taken from the eye-level of the father.
As an article in the book accompanying the exhibition tells us, it took as late as 1995 for the UK to pass its first disability rights law. Before this time, it was deemed legal, or not against any law, for a restaurant, for instance, to deny access and service to a person in a wheelchair or an otherwise disabled person. The rationale? The sight of a disabled person or wheelchair might ruin the ambience of the restaurant. Disabled people were isolated, excluded and treated like children rather than citizens with equal rights. Alas, the gallery organisation still adopts and operates an inaccessible and ableist space.
One of the more powerful images is that of a model of a disabled boy, rendered in fibreglass, who stood outside shops, and served as solicitation for charity and functioned as a collection plate for the disabled. Here the boy has the signage “PISS ON PITY” on him. “Piss On Pity” was the rallying cry for those in the disability-inclusive circles of the UK. It was deployed in protest at charities that fundraise by portraying disabled people as burdensome and helpless. The campaign resulted in ending the BBC and ITV telethons’ portrayal of disabled people as objects of pity who needed donations to get by. The successful call for rights and legislation rather than condescension and donation lead to both the BBC and ITV cancelling their telethons in the early 1990s. Still, in this exhibition, images that show challenges to inaccessible transport, for instance, remain inaccessible.
One of the ironies of walking through this exhibition is that by the time you have got to the end, with a stroke of a pen, someone in the White House for instance, might have undone much of the decades of struggle, resistance, and rights gained. We often forget how the things we fought for, and sometimes take for granted, were secured and maintained. How lip-service is no service at all. And especially how fragile they can be and how they need constant vigilance and defending. The exhibition is a useful reminder of this.
The show limits itself to ending in 2003, when soon, just about anyone, in principle, could be a photographer of resistance from their mobile phone. We miss then, the 2008 financial crash protests – “We are the 99%”, the resistance against austerity, #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, the Second EU referendum marches, 250,000 in the UK in 2018 saying ‘Stop Trump’, and perhaps the most crucial resistance for the planet in terms of environmental protest – “Just Stop Oil”. Ending in 2003 inadvertently seems to make resistance and protest a museum piece.
The Gallery itself overlooks the East Kent coast and J.M.W. Turner’s skies. It is a stone’s throw away from the Victorian shelter where a century earlier T.S. Eliot sat and wrote, in The Waste Land, ‘On Margate Sands. / I can connect / Nothing with nothing.’ The exhibition, on the other hand, invites us to connect everything with everything. As Gary Younge, in the ‘Introduction’ to the book accompanying the exhibition, states, “each act of defiance both draws from the last and nourishes the next, providing a cascading sense of possibility.” Resist and connect, that is the message. If only one could see it, and keep a steady gaze, through the hazy mediation, standardisation and monetisation of the professional-class art-world.
