Gareth McConnell’s resonant portraits from London’s 2003 anti-war protest

On Saturday February 15, 2003, an estimated 1.5 million people took to the streets of Central London to march against the looming war in Iraq. The ocean of protestors comprised the official organisers – the Stop the War Coalition, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and the Muslim Association of Great Britain – as well as many hundreds of other groups, who affiliated themselves in a vast, unlikely unity. Individuals from left to right, radical to uncommitted joined forces for a brief moment to protest Tony Blair’s unqualified and unwavering support for George W. Bush’s plan to invade Iraq. A plan constructed on fabled false claims about weapons of mass destruction. The demonstration remains to this day the largest ever held in the UK. 

“It was (yet another) End of Something and Beginning of Something Else. It was neither The Very End nor An Absolute Beginning. It was mid-pivot. Maybe the epicentre of the spin,” writes author Iphgenia Baal in The Stop, (published by Sorika) a new book based on images taken by photographer Gareth McConnell during the demonstration. Baal situates that “mid-pivot” as “After 9/11. Before The Internet. And before mobile phones” (or before both had “hybred” into “Weapons of Mass Distraction”), while McConnell’s portraits serve as a bittersweet time capsule, capturing a hopeful moment of unprecedented solidarity which nonetheless failed in its intent to stop one of the 21st century’s first horror shows of Western interventionism.

McConnell was about 30 at the time of the protest, living with friends in a shared house in London and working on a photo book about his experience of growing up during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. “[I was] trying to make sense of what happened there – the hatred, violence and sectarian division,” he explains in a conversation over email. He was “repulsed by the ‘Newspeak’” surrounding the preparation for the invasion of Iraq, and joined the march “as a participant and as a witness photographer”.

In keeping with his career-spanning interest in youth culture and ‘outsider’ figures, McConnell’s images capture young people present at the demonstration. His lens is trained on social and political signifiers – words and slogans on placards (“MAKE TEA NOT WAR”, “STOP the U$ destroying the world”), as well as signage and markings on skin and clothing (“Misled Youth” skate tees, flushed cheeks decorated with peace signs). Eyes are redacted, out of respect for his subjects. “Anonymity is a spiritual principle. The camera is a weapon. It has both positive and negative potential,” he notes.

“Anonymity is a spiritual principle. The camera is a weapon. It has both positive and negative potential” – Gareth McConnell

McConnell’s recollections of that day are hazy. He remembers fragments, “mainly lots and lots of people, maybe a collective optimism? The noise.” An ode to the transience of the moment, he places his portraits alongside photographs of flowers as a kind of “retrospective memento mori”, a reflection of the “fragile beauty” of the young demonstrators.

A long-running motif in his work, McConnell’s flowers are also symbolic of mourning – a poignant nod to the death and destruction that followed the 2003 invasion of Iraq. To explain their pertinence, he shares an extract from The Meaning Of Flowers (2022), a text penned by writer Neal Brown on the link between McConnell’s floral imagery and his childhood in Northern Ireland: “Weeping families in black – not psychedelia / Flowers / Flowers in and on hearse vehicles / Linked arms / Carrying coffins with flowers / Crowds – holding flowers / TV cameras – filming the flowers / Police – standing beside the flowers / Enemies can see the beauty of each other’s flowers / Flower wreaths – mums, dads, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles, aunts, friends, colleagues, local tradespeople, neighbours”.

In The Stop, these images of flowers and fresh-faced activists are interspersed with Iphgenia Baal’s terse meditations on the confused legacy of the demonstration. At times, her words ally with the images in conveying the impressive scope of the march: “The notion that it is impossible to organise without the connectivity phones provide is now near-sacred, but The Stop… is everything that phones and social media later promise to deliver – and instead destroy”. 

At others, her caustic observations cut right through them: “One month after two million people congregate in London (a number so large you could be out by 50,000 and still not be misreporting attendance) (and millions more do the same in cities around the world), George Double-yu and his zealous co-conspirators (us) invade modern-day Mesopotamia, that alluvial cradle of civilisation, anyway.”

For Baal, the demonstration’s ultimate inability to silence the drumbeat to war had real implications on protest movements in the years that followed. “I’m not even sure if stopping the war was the intended goal. It was more about bearing witness. It was a big, loud, collective ‘no’,” she tells Dazed. “But when the war went ahead anyway, in flagrant disregard of what was undoubtedly the will of the people, it made the general public lose faith in the effectiveness of protest for the best part of a decade.”

Alongside her writing are snatches of news coverage. “I just think the world’s going mad. I just feel it’s got to be stopped, somewhere. Because after this, it’ll be something else. It’ll be war after war after war,” reads one soundbite, which weighs even heavier with the value of hindsight. Cut to the present, and the fourth largest demonstration in the UK’s history is now the PSC March for Palestine that took place last November, calling for a ceasefire in Gaza – another peace march against another invasion with Western military backing. It’s an atrocity that’s likely to elicit official apologies from presidents and prime ministers in decades to come, when the damage is already done; the same “sorrow and regret” Tony Blair expressed in 2016 over Iraq, many years and many lives too late. 

“Our present moment is a hideously dangerous one. We teeter on the brink of countless interlinked world-changing disasters that constantly threaten to destabilise life as we know it” – Iphgenia Baal

It’s the crisis of humanity surrounding The Stop’s publication, and the pro-Palestine protests erupting on university campuses across the world, that makes it all the more pressing. As Baal notes in the text, it is “always hard to tell, when you’re in The Moment, which exact moment it is.” But if she were pushed to pinpoint this current one? 

“I’m going to go with the current vogue of saying that our present moment is a hideously dangerous one. We teeter on the brink of countless interlinked world-changing disasters that constantly threaten to destabilise life as we know it,” she responds. “The oddity of the moment is that while the stakes are as high as ever, there is also a resonant disconnect, which can be put down to the way the internet/socials tinge everything with corporate.” 

She describes the way people can consume a video of babies being massacred in Gaza, then like a picture of themselves tagged at a destination wedding the next. It is, as she writes in the book, “genocide dipped in rice water and honey face mask reels and hipster-austerity gardening-crypto memes”.

For McConnell, his response to the suffering and destruction surrounding him has always been to create. He says he feels “overwhelmed by ‘the need’” to make work at times like this. For readers, this particular book serves as a testament to the possibilities of collective organisation, as an archival object of youth culture, and also as a warning – about the price of ignoring the people.

The Stop is published by Sorika and is available here. The book launch and signing will take place on Saturday May 18, 4pm, at OffPrint, Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London.