“Art in itself doesn’t change anything,” Peter Kennard told the British Journal of Photography in 2021. “But when it’s aligned to a political movement, it becomes its visual arm.” Kennard came to this realization in 1968, in London, when he joined a protest against the Vietman War. The experience led to a decision: Kennard would abandon painting and galleries, and instead publish his work in magazines. He began working in photomontage, cutting up prints in the darkroom and inserting them into other images. Kennard has since put his art to work for such causes as the Anti-Apartheid Movement, nuclear disarmament, and ending the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza. Many images in “Archive of Dissent” are bound to shock.
—Elena Clavarino