Resistance: How Protest Shaped Britain and Photography Shaped Protest
Turner Contemporary, Margate

CONCEIVED by artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen, Resistance recently opened in Margate, Kent. This is a curation of 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 on the cusp of the proliferation of camera-phones. 

The people are seen standing up for women’s rights, workers’ 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, sit-downs, kiss-ins, joy, despair, body paint, raves, prams, marches, slogans, 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. 

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, squalor, Molotov cocktails, mobilisation, tree villages, candle-lit 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 are captured within the remarkable time freezing and gritty realism of the lenses of Paul Trevor, Janine Wiedel, 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 decade 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 act of Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to.”

A recurring feature of the photographs is the presence of the repressive state apparatus. That is, the police under orders, kicking back against the people in the form of surveillance photos, mugshots, and sheer presence. In several photos, policemen hugely outnumber the protesters. A 1907 shot shows suffragette Dora Thewlis arrested and flanked by two policemen. A single Cable Street anti-fascist demonstrator is shown being taken away by 10 policemen, seven of them on horseback. 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.” 

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. And especially how fragile they can be and how they need constant vigilance and defending. The exhibition is a useful reminder.

The Gallery itself overlooks the East Kent coast and JMW Turner’s skies. It is a stone’s throw away from the Victorian shelter where a century earlier TS Eliot 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.

Runs until June 1 2025. Admission free. For more information see: turnercontemporary.org