Resistance

Resistance: How protest shaped Britain and photography shaped protest

Turner Contemporary, Margate, 22 February – 1 June 2025 

Review by Mendez

My initial thought was that Resistance, co-curated by Steve McQueen at Margate’s Turner Contemporary, was missing archive footage, just to add some life and energy. But that’s beside the point: still images allow you to read the story for yourself. 

From the early 20th century, activists saw a way to spread their message to a wider public by collaborating with press photographers. A remarkable image from 1913 shows the arrest of a woman named Annie Kenney. of the ‘Women’s Social and Political Union’, in a loose white dress, surrounded by men in tailored clothing, some of them police. She smiles knowingly at the camera, conscious of her power to control the narrative even as she is being apprehended. The message is conveyed that as she fights for the right to vote, she is villainised, but women like her are not the danger. For every deployment of a new technology, like the portable camera, to give regular people a voice, there is an opportunity for it to be used against them, as the suffragists found when they were subjected to surveillance, which enabled police to forestall planned protests. 

I noticed that some of the photojournalism depicting black subjects tended to prominently feature a white person, or – surely not by accident – a white person in the image pulled focus. These images were published in mainstream newspapers, and pointed to how the viewer should feel, to employ us into the cause. At the Pan-African conference in Manchester in 1945, John Deakin captured a white male delegate in the foreground, listening intently, among an assembly of black African heads of state. The suggestion to the (white) viewer is also to listen; post-WWII Britain could no longer afford to maintain an empire, so it was best for all concerned that Britain’s then-colonies should organise independence. Similarly, at the centre of an image captured by Edward Miller from the funeral of Kelso Cochrane, an Antiguan carpenter who was stabbed to death by a gang of white youths in West London in 1959, is a white woman with one arm around a biracial child, dabbing her eyes with her free hand. The woman in the photograph might be the child’s mother, but as this is the funeral of a black man it is implied that the child’s father is absent, as Cochrane tragically was, and so the message is one exhorting mother-country maternal duty. Images like these appealed to the humanity of middle- and working-class White British people turned off by the racist, xenophobic rhetoric of the then-buoyant far right.

The Windrush Generation walked blindly into a fascist movement that had reached a peak before the war with the Battle of Cable Street in 1936, which saw upwards of 100,000 anti-fascists converge on East London – where many Jewish people lived – to successfully block routes for the British Union of Fascists’ planned march, while risking arrest. Eddie Worth’s shot of a young anti-fascist demonstrator being taken away, surrounded by police on horseback, recalls Annie Kenney, though the demonstrator here appears more vulnerable. An unknown photographer captures the BUF’s leader, Oswald Mosley, in military pomp and greeting his adoring crowd with the Sieg Heil in 1937; another unknown photographer finds Mosley back in civilian clothing and on his soap box, humbled by the Nazis’ defeat, in the same year as the Empire Windrush broadened the fascist chagrin. 

Nearby, is a delicious pairing of two images by photographers unknown that demonstrate the relative mindsets and cultures of fascists and anti-fascists. In the first, a queue of individuals, mostly men, line up to join the fascist movement. Even as they huddle up one behind another, they all look lost, lonely and fearful, as if they have nothing in common beyond a remote fantasy. The lone woman, central to the image because she is looking at the camera, does so with a defiant sneer. The light source is the creepy doorway they are queueing up to enter. The second photo depicts a group of anti-fascists of mixed genders looking smart, clean-cut, and all smiling for the camera, hugging each other in a welcoming, well-lit interior. There is no one individual focus; they are a group, and they are strong in their unity. 

Several photographers working in the late 1970s bore witness as the fascist movement again attempted to advance into mainstream politics. Vanley Burke’s work documenting a liberatory march among Handsworth’s Afro-Caribbean community showed young Black Britons embracing a radical new subjectivity. Syd Shelton photographed a man walking past graffiti imploring people to ‘Remember Cable Street. Smash Racism’. For The Battle of Cable Street, 1936 read The Battle of Lewisham, 1977; Paul Trevor’s overhead shot of a 4,000-strong crowd blocking the route of a National Front demonstration through New Cross shows a multi-ethnic group of men and women united in the fight. The Rock Against Racism movement and the emergence of the ska revival scene, again shot by Syd Shelton, reflected Britain’s developing self-awareness as a multicultural nation, with both white and black people inspired by a common sound and style. Britain has said no to fascism more than once before and will do so again.

Much of McQueen’s film and TV work has centred the political landscape and sites of resistance in Britain in the 1970s and ’80s – which he has called ‘The Golden Age of Resistance’ – and parts of this exhibition feel like a glimpse into his creative process. 1981 was the height of ‘sus’ laws and subsequent uprisings in every major British city that summer. The year began with the New Cross Massacre early in the morning of the 18th January, in which thirteen young black people died by fire and smoke (another took his own life two years later). I had never seen Geoffrey White’s picture of the row of terraced houses before, taken on the same day from a safe distance, with one house blackened and the others perfectly intact. The fire engine is still outside as a crowd of people looks on. It’s hard to argue that the house, in which a sixteenth-birthday party was going on and from which black music would have bled into the street, wasn’t deliberately targeted. The Black People’s Day of Action on March 2nd, documented by Vron Ware and by Rowntree, Monks and Burton, was the largest public demonstration yet of Black British outrage and determination to be heard.

The show draws other parallels between the 1930s and 1980s. In 1936, David Savill photographed unemployed workers marching from the northeastern industrial town of Jarrow to London – a 280-mile, four-day trip – to protest against the government’s failure to provide jobs after the demise of the town’s shipyard and a failed steelworks plan. The workers, some playing the harmonica for morale, were photographed walking through the village of Lavendon, Buckinghamshire. In 1981, Martin Jenkinson caught the People’s March for Jobs as it coursed from Liverpool round the same bend through Lavendon, to London. These two images are exhibited one above the other, inviting us to compare what has changed in the intervening 45 years (clothing, vehicles, a demolished building, the racial diversity of the working class) and what has stayed the same (mass disenfranchisement). Humphrey Spender’s 1938 image of children playing in the rubble on a derelict street in Jarrow displayed across the room from Tish Murtha’s 1981 photograph of children jumping onto mattresses both capture the innocence of industrial decline, and the playground allure of a wreckage. I often think about the hastily-built postwar spaces I spent much of my Eighties childhood in and how many are now gone, like my primary school. It is assumed that the buildings we – outside the economic and cultural hegemony – inhabit lack any longer-term cultural significance and so are neither advocated for, nor protected by means of listing. They are forgotten if someone does not decide to go out of their way to document them, resulting in a kind of emotional homelessness. 

Linton Kwesi Johnson has said that no art can stand in as a substitute for activism; activists understand that they must put their bodies on the line, that their presence cannot be ignored or forgotten. Jayaben Desai – a petite South Asian woman – led a mass picket at the Grunwick film-processing factory over insulting, patronising treatment and derisory pay, attracting allyship from Arthur Scargill. Andrew Wiard photographed Desai remonstrating with police on the opening day of the picket in 1977, defiant in the face of possible violence. Janine Wiedel documented the women’s anti-nuclear-weapons camp at Greenham Common and captured a camaraderie and tenderness a male photographer would not be privy to, including a beautiful twilight dance atop a silo. Mass protests by the LGBTQIA+ community showed its collective disgust at the passing of Clause 28 in 1988, which banned the “promotion” of homosexuality in schools and the workplace. Pam Isherwood’s photograph of an anti-Clause 28 demonstration in Manchester showed two people utilising the deely-bopper trend to riff on the alienation and dehumanisation of queer people. Glynis Neslen’s capture of an animated Angela Y. Davis giving an International Women’s Week speech at Hackney Town Hall in 1986 was important in marking the rise of intersectional feminism (though that term hadn’t yet been coined). Andrew Testa photographed protestors’ occupation of trees to stop them being cut down for the Newbury Bypass in 1996, as environmental protection became our number one concern in the twenty-first century. 

The scope of Resistance (1903-2003) takes it to the brink of social media, an era that has facilitated and witnessed countless more images of protest. The show, yet another coup for the Turner Contemporary, is an education for anyone interested in how they might contribute today. It doesn’t matter who you are, or how powerful the opponent. You have what a lot of people in the past didn’t – a tool of resistance in your own pocket.