ASSENT
Michael Alberry
£28.00
Assent is a book of portraits of riot police officers made at the Kill the Bill protests against the British Government’s ‘Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill’ — legislation designed to extend police powers to stop peaceful protest. The Bill was passed into law through its ‘Royal Assent’ in 2022... Read More
Assent is a book of portraits of riot police officers made at the Kill the Bill protests against the British Government’s ‘Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill’ — legislation designed to extend police powers to stop peaceful protest. The Bill was passed into law through its ‘Royal Assent’ in 2022 and is widely employed by police forces in the UK today.
On the evening of 21 March 2021, after thousands attended a peaceful demonstration against the Bill, violence erupted in clashes between police and protesters outside Bristol’s central police station.
Photographing through riot shields and visors, Alberry finds faces caught between aggression, fatigue, and mingling doubt. Drawing on Sartre’s concept of bad faith, the book examines how individuals internalise the institutional roles they perform — how personal conscience becomes subsumed by duty to state authority.
When first opened, the French-folded pages make only the text of the Bill visible. To reach the portraits of those it empowers, the reader must cut open each sealed page — a deliberate act that exposes the fragile, conflicted humanity beneath the machinery of law.