“Resistance” takes visitors on a “voyage of discovery in black and white”, said Nancy Durrant in The Times. Conceived by Oscar-winning filmmaker Steve McQueen and curated in collaboration with Clarrie Wallis, the “fascinating” exhibition explores 100 years of protest in Britain through photography.
The show begins with the suffrage movement in 1903 and concludes with the anti-Iraq war marches a century later. But the “deeply researched” exhibition also shines a light on “long forgotten protests” like the mass hunger marches that took place in London during the Great Depression, and the Headscarf Campaign led by women in Hull to improve safety for fishermen following the 1968 trawler disaster.
Throughout the show, the “tone remains pathologically cool and resolutely factual, almost to a fault”. In the end, however, it’s “hard” not to be “moved” by the powerful images.
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My “favourite” photo is an “intimate” shot by Keith Pattison of a striking pitman and his family gathered in their living room, said Gabrielle Schwarz in The Telegraph. They’re watching Arthur Scargill, the president of the National Union of Mineworkers on TV; the “bearded face of Karl Marx” looks down from a poster on the wall. “Resistance isn’t only a matter of big dramatic confrontations: it’s part of everyday life.”
However an “excess of caution” means the last two decades of history are left out. “Live issues” that could still be considered “controversial” like Gaza or the climate crisis are glaringly omitted. “Blurry phone snaps” wouldn’t be as “beautiful” as the “artful black-and-white film prints”. But perhaps “resistance should look messier – less palatable and more dangerous – than it does here”.
Still, it’s a “compelling” show, said Adrian Searle in The Guardian. From “anonymous press images” to “personal shots” and “surreptitious surveillance images”, “Resistance” is an exhibition of “fractured continuities and swerving vantage points”.
All of the prints “invite close looking” and it can be easy to get “caught up in the incidental details” like the “policeman wheeling his bike behind the Jarrow marchers” or the “knock-kneed” child looking at Christine Spengler as she takes a photo of a “young British soldier on a Belfast corner in 1970”.
“The stories bolster the images and keep the whole thing alive.”
Resistance is at Turner Contemporary, Margate, until 1 June
