When setting foot into the seafront galleries of the Turner Contemporary’s exhibition Resistance, you might anticipate rooms full of images of people pushing placards high up to the sky. In any photo documentary exhibition on a history of protest, this is a likely occurrence; but in the context of twentieth-century Britain, it’s far from all that’s in store.
Amongst the exhibitions more prototypical photographs of protest stand images remembering events that expand on archetypal ideas of ‘resistance’. Namely, the Caribbean festivals of the 1950’s that saw joy as an integral form of resistance to racist violence, a spirit that now lives on in Notting Hill carnival; and the quiet, candle lit vigils that surrounded the AIDS crisis in the 80’s; to the communal living of Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp that fought again rising nuclear armament. Across the last century of activism in Britain, resistance exists in many unsuspecting and unruly forms – not just marches and confrontation.
The show charts key moments over its timeline. From the beginnings of the suffragette movement in 1903 and events like the Black People’s day of action and the Miners Strike, to lesser known moments, like the Blind March of 1920, before ending with a focus on the largest protest in British history: the 2003 march against the Iraq war. In the context of these images, a history of photography slowly unfolds. From cumbersome, unsupportable cameras to handheld point and shoots, concluding just as this technology became all the more commonplace – readily accessible to the average citizen.
For Clarrie Wallis, director at the Turner and curator of the exhibtion, Resistance sees photography “evolve from a specialised medium to a grassroots tool for self-documentation”. With the rise of handheld, easily tansportable cameras, media and state surveillance could no longer solely define how history would remember pivotal moments in time. Photographs were not only a tool that came to define the movements that they captured, but a way to ‘bear witness’ – a form of evidence and testimony before the age of social media and smartphones.
Many of the images on display at the Turner were captured by anonymous photographers that we’ll never know the name of, drawn from years of research in public archives and grassroots collections. Many of these images have been previously unseen in print, historical moments that have remained hidden for decades, shielding us from the perspective of activists and communities that fought for the rights we have today. In Resistance, these viewpoints sit comfortably alongside well known photographs and start to, in Clarrie’s words, “democratise the historical narrative”.