Steve McQueen photography exhibition offers fresh take on history of protest in Britain

After retelling the story of the Blitz from a new angle, Steve McQueen’s next project is an alternative photographic history of protest and campaigning in Britain, spanning a century from the suffragettes to the Iraq war protests.

Resistance will open at Margate’s Turner Contemporary in February 2025, which the gallery’s director said would show how “photography has really acted as a kind of catalyst for change” in the UK.

Clarrie Wallis, who first worked with McQueen on Year 3 at Tate Britain, said Resistance is a continuation of the artist and director’s concentration on telling untold stories.

“It’s a portrait of Britain,” she said. “It’s understanding the shape of Britain, how we are, where we are. Steve has a commitment of bringing marginalised histories into the mainstream.”

The exhibition, which is also planning to tour around the UK, starts in 1903 with images of the suffragettes that were published by a supportive picture editor at the Daily Mirror and finishes in 2003 with the Iraq war protests – the largest ever seen in the UK, as 1.5 million people took to the streets of the capital.

Curated by McQueen and produced after a four-year research process, Resistance also includes images from the Battle of Cable Street when fascists clashed with Jewish and anti-fascist protesters in London’s East End in 1936 and the Battle of Lewisham, when the National Front were confronted in the multicultural area of south London in 1977.

A demonstrator is taken away by police officers during the Battle of Cable street, in east London when Jewish and anti-fascist protesters clashed with fascists in 1936. Photograph: Eddie Worth/Associated Press/Alamy

“It is also about us understanding our shared past,” said Wallis. “It’s interesting when you look at the Battle of Cable Street, and then you look at the Battle of Lewisham, you know, and then recent events. There is that sense of really wanting to shine a light on these stories that people aren’t aware of.”

McQueen and researchers have trawled agency archives and personal collections to foster new perspectives on the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament; the Friends of the Earth’s first protest against the banning of bottle returns by Schweppes; the Kinder Scout trespasses of 1932 that led to the founding of the national parks; and the Hull trawler wives who campaigned for more safety at sea after several fatalities.

There will also be photographs that were taken on the Black People’s Day of Action in 1981, a mass demonstration that weaved its way through London and was organised after a house fire at 439 New Cross Road that claimed the lives of 13 black children.

Anti-racists gather to block the route of a National Front demonstration on New Cross Road, London, August 1977. Photograph: Paul Trevor

McQueen has previously produced a documentary about the tragedy, which followed his five-film Small Axe series in 2020.

Many of Britain’s best-known photographers appear in the exhibition, including Vanley Burke, Henry Grant, Fay Godwin, Edith Tudor-Hart, Tish Murtha, Humphrey Spender, Andrew Testa and Paul Trevor. Works by Christine Spengler and Janine Wiedel will also feature. An accompanying book will be published by 4th Estate and will feature writing from Paul Gilroy, Leila Hassan Howe, Gary Younge and Sally Alexander.

McQueen’s latest film, Blitz, displayed a more diverse side to London during the German bombing raids, with a Nigerian air raid warden, and Ken “Snakehips” Johnson, a gay jazz singer who performed at London’s Café de Paris, both appearing.

Protesters at a demonstration against section 28, which prohibited the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality by local authorities and schools, in London in 1988. Photograph: Pam Isherwood/Bishopsgate Institute

The lead character, George, was inspired by a picture McQueen saw of a young black boy being evacuated from London in the 1940s. “I came across this photograph of this small black child, this boy with a large overcoat and a very large suitcase. I thought to myself, that’s my ‘in’. Who was he, what was his story, we need to see the war through his eyes. What was it like for him?”

Wallis said: “In some ways this was a massive history research project, not dissimilar to the work that he was doing around Blitz: excavating and finding stories that, for different reasons, haven’t properly come to light.”

The Oscar-winning film director recently revealed that he paused the filming of Blitz in order to be treated for prostate cancer. McQueen, whose father died of the disease in 2006, spoke for the first time about his own treatment, which led to a tumour being removed in November 2022.

• Resistance is on at the Turner Contemporary in Margate from 22 February to 1 June 2025