Photos of Hong Kong protests tragic, and beautiful
Credit to Author: John Mackie| Date: Thu, 16 Jan 2020 23:53:49 +0000
Images from the protests in Hong Kong have riveted the world for the past year. But they have a special resonance in Vancouver, where many people either used to live in Hong Kong or know somebody who lives there now.
Which makes a new show at the Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver timely. Revolution in Our Times features 36 photos of the Hong Kong protests by 18 photojournalists.
The photos are dramatic, beautiful and disturbing, an up-close and personal view of a people rising up against their government.
American Aaron Guy Leroux has been covering the protests since last June, and said they’re “intense, really chaotic, (and) a little scary.”
“Usually (they start with) a large mass peaceful protest that dwindles throughout the day,” relates the 41-year-old, who flew in from Hong Kong for the opening on Thursday.
“They’re permitted, but the police have been cutting back. If the permit is till 10 o’clock, at 8:30 they’ll go (slaps his hand), ‘Okay, this is now an illegal protest.’ And then it escalates from there.”
He’s been in the middle of some wild action, such as a protest at a luxury mall on July 14 that spiralled out of control. You can see it in his photo of a riot policeman striding towards him, yelling, with his baton extended in one hand and his shield in the other.
“The police had corralled a couple of thousand protesters into this mall, and the mall had a MTR metro station in it,” he explains.
“They blocked people from leaving on the metro and sent police into the mall and caused a massive (clash), basically an actual riot. Pepper spray everywhere, police beating people, protesters beating police, a police officer got his thumb bitten off, a lot of innocent people got hurt.
“It was chaos, one of the worst nights I’ve ever had in Hong Kong.”
Aaron Guy Leroux photo of protesters and riot police engaging in open combat in the New Park Mall in Hong Kong, July 14, 2019.
Leroux has another photo in the exhibit of a protester pouring water on a tear-gas canister.
“The police were lobbing tear gas shells over towards where we were, just constantly, poom-poom, poom-poom, poom-poom,” he recounts.
“One landed next to me and this guy, a protester, just walked over and poured his water on it to put it out. The most effective way (to negate tear gas) is to put it in something — mud works really well, they shake it up and extinguish it. But you can just pour water on it it’ll begin to extinguish the little cartridges.”
The other photographer who’s here for the exhibition is Adam Malamis, a 39-year-old from London, Ont.
Malamis has an incredible aerial panorama of thousands of people protesting at the Chinese University of Hong Kong that shows the sheer size of the protests. But he also has a touching close-up photo of some elderly people holding their hand over their eye.
“It was a solidarity protest with the young lady who lost her right eye (in a confrontation with the police), that’s why they’re covering their eye,” said Malamis.
The participating photographers submitted about 500 photos to three judges, who selected the photos in the show. There will be QR codes attached to the images that you can scan to hear the various photographers talking about their shot.
Some of most striking images came from French photographer Rémy Soubanère, including Grief Day, a beautiful nighttime photo of a mass of police in full riot gear marching down a main street at night.
The police are dark and menacing but the background is neon signs and a pulsing city, an incongruous mix. It’s like the storm troopers from Star Wars landing on the set of Bladerunner.
Rémy Soubanère photo of Hong Kong protesters protecting themselves from fire hoses and police surveillance.
Another Soubanère photo features protesters taking cover from the rain under umbrellas. Looks simple, but it isn’t.
“That’s not rain, that’s a water cannon,” said Leroux.
The exhibition runs from Jan. 16 to Jan. 26 at the Polygon, which is at the foot of Lonsdale on the North Vancouver waterfront. Leroux and Malamis will be giving guided tours by RSVP, and will also be giving a photojournalism talk at the Polygon at 7 p.m. Jan. 22.
The prints are also for sale on the website www.revolutionofourtimes.hk.
Rémy Soubanère photo Barricade Lovers, featuring two Hong Kong protesters sharing a tender moment in Mong Kok, October 13th, 2019.
P.H. Yang photo of 6,000 people in central Hong Kong, many of them mothers, in a sit-in against police brutality and the China extradition law on June 14, 2019.
Adryel Talamantes photo of a man pinned on the ground by Hong Kong police as officers lock their arms to form a barrier during a confrontation in Causeway Bay before the start of a pro-democracy march, September 29, 2019 in Hong Kong.
Adryel Talamantes photo of schoolgirls carrying a sign during a pro-democracy demonstration in Shatin along the banks of the Shing Mun river on Sept 19, 2019 in Hong Kong. The slogan refers to the five demands of the demonstrators, who would accept “not one less” from the government.
Adam Malamis’ photo In Solidarity is part of a new exhibition at the Polygon Gallery, Revolution of Our Times.
Aaron Guy Leroux photo of a member of the Black Bloc trying to extinguish a tear gas cartridge in the Admiralty, Hong Kong on October 1, 2019.
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