Picture Series

I started my career as a citizen journalist/independent journalist in the Umbrella movement, also known as Occupying Central Movement in Hong Kong. When I watched the TV news at home and saw the police fired tear gas at the protesters – mainly students – I thought I should do something. I ran away from home with my camera and started to take photos for the whole movement. After the movement, I started to work as a photojournalist for a daily newspaper in Hong Kong.

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University had been besieged by the police for two weeks. Thousands of young protesters were trapped inside the campus. Police claimed that all the people inside the campus would be charged with rioting. Hundreds of protesters were injured. Some of them attempted sewer tunnel escapes and rope climbing escapes from a bridge. The campus was totally in a mess and horror. It just looked like ruins after a war. It was hard to find the remaining protesters because they were hiding and locked themselves in some dark, small and hidden room. Therefore, I tried to take pictures of the landscapes and stuffs in the campus. I think the landscapes can also tell stories. Landscapes are just like the human portraits. They have a different appearance. You can look through the details in a landscape just like you look through the eyes of the person in a portrait, then you can discover and feel something behind it. I think you can also feel the “spector” behind the landscapes taken by me.

“Objective documentary” was the main trend of visual journalism in the past, but I think “subjective documentary” will be more likely to become a trend of visual journalism in the future. The idea and perspective of a photographer is more important in the future. The boundary between documentary photography and contemporary art photography will merge. More kinds of forms of storytelling will be acceptable.

In Hong Kong, police violence against journalists always occurs, and journalists are seen as a thorn in police flesh. An Indonesian journalist was blinded in one eye because of a rubber bullet shot by police during the Hong Kong Protest, and the police often set up blockades at demonstration sites, so that the journalists are not able to work. I remember that on the first day of the police siege and blockade of the Polytechnic University on November 16, last year, the police announced that all those who stayed at the university would be charged with riots, including journalists. They carried loaded guns to threaten all of us on the campus. All our reporters discussed whether we should stay on the rooftop of the Polytechnic University, and almost all of us decided to do so. We felt that it was our responsibility as journalists to stay on campus.

In the early days of the pandemic, there were many demonstrations in Hong Kong demanding the closure of the border with mainland China. Among them, the strike of the doctors and nurses was a key to the government’s decision to close the border. However, police is recently arresting protesters by using the emergency law about prohibited group gatherings and bans all protests, including the Candlelight Vigil for the June 4 Massacre, annually organised in Hong Kong.

The democratic demonstrations in Hong Kong have never really been interrupted and the protests continue until today. Even though the road ahead is unclear, China’s suppression of Hong Kong is getting bigger and bigger. I want to conclude and encourage with a sentence from a psalm by David in the Bible: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me: thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.”