BOOKS

PROJECTS
Shadows and the Silent Majority
2024-2025



The Axe Will Survive The Master
2013-2025

The Axe Will Survive the Master is an oblique record of life on a faltering planet. Created over twelve years and across continents, Matthew Connors’s photographs trace the contours of an era shaped by confrontations with authoritarian power. From the Arab Spring to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Connors traverses scenes of global upheaval marked by disintegrating social contracts, political violence, and the lingering reverberations of the Cold War.
Unanimous Desires
2013-2016

Unanimous Desires is a photographic speculation about the conditions of existence in North Korea.  Despite heavy restrictions on travel, Connors visited the reclusive nation on five government-organized tours between 2013 and 2016.  
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The Poetics
2017

In July of 2017, photographer Matthew Connors and novelist Lucy Ives embarked on a strange project: to remove and catalog all the contents of Connors's car, a 1992 Volvo 240 station wagon.
Fire in Cairo
2013

Fire in Cairo emerged from Egypt as an oblique and fragmentary document of revolutionary struggle. The work charts Connors’ uneasy engagement with the political turmoil that gripped the nation during its rapidly unfolding history.
General Assembly
2011-2012
The collective power of public assembly is one of the most effective instruments of opposition at the core of every protest movement. In the wake of economic calamity, these protesters and activists congregated at the doorstep of New York City's financial institutions to challenge the power of global capital and contemplate the contours of alternative systems.
Tenuous Republics
2003-2011

Matthew Connors presents apparently straightforward narratives of people moving through public spaces. Yet hidden in the work are questions: What is the dynamic of a city? And how can photography reveal this? The cities in his work are real places—Hong Kong, New York, Reykjavik—with real inhabitants, but his photographs depict fictional encounters in anonymous post-industrial cityscapes.



MATTHEW CONNORS
News


BioMatthew Connors is an artist whose commitment to the medium of photography has been propelled by the revelatory potential of the public sphere. Rooted in specific currents of history, his bodies of work create a new visual encyclopedia of forms, portraits, symbols, and residues that emerge from protest movements, war, and oppressive systems of governance. His lyrical yet methodical approach resonates with political documentary and street photography, but continually challenges and transforms these categories.

His photographs have been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma, the MFA Boston, and DOX Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague. His first monograph Fire in Cairo (SPBH Editions, 2015) was awarded the ICP Infinity Award for best artist book in 2016. He has also been awarded the Abigail Cohen Rome Prize, a Headlands Center for the Arts Residency, two MacDowell Colony Fellowships, the Lightwork Artist-in-Residence Fellowship, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts Fellowship. 

Connors earned a BA in English Literature from the University of Chicago and a MFA in Photography from Yale University. He has taught in the Image Text Ithaca MFA Program, the Yale University MFA Program, and in the Photography Department at the Massachusetts College of Art & Design where he has been a professor since 2004.   


Texts




Awards





The Axe Will Survive the Master



Photographs and text by Matthew Connors
Design by Brian Paul Lamotte
MACK/SPBH Editions, London, 2026
Hardcover, lithography, 208 pages, 7.9 x 10 in.


Fire in Cairo



Photographs and text by Matthew Connors
Design by Antonio de Luca
SPBH Editions, London, 2015
Hardcover, lithography, 148 pages, 7.85 x 10 in.
Edition of 1000
The Poetics
Photographs by Matthew Connors
Text by Lucy Ives
Design by Elana Schlenker
Image Text Ithaca Press,  2019
Softcover, 188 pages, 5.25 x 8 in.
Edition of 600
General Assembly


Photographs and text by Matthew Connors
Handmade Artist Book, 2013
Hardcover, 670 pages, 7.75 x 9.75 in.
Edition of 3 with 1 AP
Wake


Photographs by Matthew Connors
Roman Nvmerals Press, New York, 2019
Softcover, 24 pages, 9.25 x 13 in.
Unbound
Contact Sheet 208: Matthew Connors



General Assembly Exhibition Catalogue
Photographs by Matthew Connors
Text by Mary Lee Hodgens
Light Work, Syracuse, NY, 2020
Softcover, 48 pages, 9 x 10 in.
Edition of 2700
SPBH Pamphlet I

Ancient Heavy Transport
Photography by Matthew Connors
Text by Jeremy Ravi Mumford
Edited by Nicholas Muellner
SPBH Editions, London, 2012


©  Matthew Connors 2026