'Resistance': A Slow Look and Mid-Run Reflections
- Amandine Vincent
- Aug 13, 2025
- 3 min read
This review draws on my personal impressions and notes from visiting the exhibition, as well as insights from Gary Younge’s opening talk. A recording of the talk can be viewed here.
Resistance : How protest shaped Britain and photography shaped protest, conceived by Steve McQueen and currently running at the National Galleries of Scotland: Modern Two, is a raw visual history of defiance in the United Kingdom from 1903 to 2003.
From suffragette marches to anti-racist movements, from environmental activism to disability rights campaigns, these images are not frozen relics—they are urgent mirrors.
The small black-and-white photographs, set in sober black frames against plain white walls, possess the same stripped-back clarity as the struggles they depict. Though at risk of appearing austere, the simplicity of the display reflects author Gary Younge’s description of those on the brink of despair who, energised by fear, find the impulse to live freely, true to themselves—by resisting.
Spanning a century of struggle for rights and justice, the photographs are records of both victories and losses against power. More importantly, they remind us that progress is not an endpoint, but another stage towards a better tomorrow. Weekends, contraception, the vote, racial equality—we inherit them because someone resisted.
Overall, the style is documentary—journalistic photographs, intimate scenes and even surveillance stills—and while all images carry emotional weight, this can at times feel a little flattened by analytical distance. Yet the curation's restraint also compels the viewer to linger and do the essential work of slow looking.
Even if the exhibition does not directly address our most recent struggles, and visitors may not be familiar with all the movements depicted—sometimes due to gaps in knowledge, sometimes to cultural differences—any initial sense of disconnect gradually fades. As viewing shifts from simple observation to active engagement, each viewer can form their own attachment with the images and stories. Visiting with children can be especially revealing in this sense, as curiosity sparks the constant need to make sense and relate. It is in this personal response that the exhibition’s strength emerges, bridging past and present, local and global, and reminding us that resistance is a shared human experience.
The images also reveal the sheer variety of protest strategies: marching, hunger striking, lying in roads, scaling trees. These actions are not just political—they are performative. They reimagine public space, disrupt the order of things, and command attention. In this way, resistance is not only an act of survival or defiance—it is an act of creativity.
While the exhibition is firmly rooted in the twentieth century, its sequencing of portraits—anonymous citizens alongside public figures—shows that resistance is never an isolated event. It is continuous and communal.
In the end, Resistance challenges us to move beyond mere discomfort or compassion when confronting desperation: to reshape it, to appropriate it, to distill distant collective action into individual essence. It asks us to remember that fear can be transformed, failed struggles may yet succeed, and victories must be defended. The work is never finished—because, as the exhibition makes clear, resistance is part of society’s DNA.
Resistance: How protest shaped Britain and photography shaped protest is on at the National Galleries Scotland: Modern Two, Edinburgh, until 4 January 2026.
More information here.
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