Image illustrating the TIME Magazine "The Umbrella Revolution"
The Umbrella Revolution
Hong Kong hosted a wave of peaceful protests in favour of democracy during last October. The so-called Umbrella Revolution is not just a movement with a political background but it means a desperate cry for keeping the identity of the people from Honk Kong. An identity that is neither Chinese nor British, but that links Eastern and Western nature on an extraordinary way. It is not causality, then, that the protagonists of the demonstrations were mostly young students who were born from 1997, the date in which Hong Kong was taken over by the Chinese government under the motto “one country two systems”, leaving behind 99 years of British colonisation. This fact granted freedom of self-management and autonomy to the people from Hong Kong that allowed them to strengthen, even more, their own national feeling of identity that was and keeps on being violated by the legislative initiatives of the new regime.
The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region shall enact laws on its own to prohibit any act of treason, secession, sedition, subversion against the Central People's Government, or theft of state secrets, to prohibit foreign political organizations or bodies from conducting political activities in the Region, and to prohibit political organizations or bodies of the Region from establishing ties with foreign political organizations or bodies.
(Article 23, Hong Kong Basic Law, 4th April 1990)
Umbrella Revolution is, along with the Arab Spring, the 15M Movement and Occupy Wall Street, the voice of millions of indignant people coming from apparently far away realities who failed to fraternise in a same cry in favour of democracy. A democracy that is nowadays devoid of freedom, and violated by the new political and economic global order.
Raquel Moreno Herrero
Participating Artists:
Paula Bronstein (USA), Reportage by Getty Images
Chris McGrath (Australia), Getty Images
Anthony Kwan (Hong Kong), Getty Images
Lam Yik Fei (Hong Kong), Getty Images / Bloomberg / NYT
Philippe Lopez (France), Agence France-Presse
Alex Ogle (United Kingdom), Agence France-Presse
Ed Jones (United Kingdom), Agence France-Presse
Anthony Wallace (Hong Kong), Agence France-Presse
Xaume Olleros (Spain), Agence France-Presse
Tyrone Siu (Hong Kong), Reuters
Carlos Barría (Argentina), Reuters
Mathieu Willcocks.Freelance
Thomas Campean, Anadulu Agency
Xaume Olleros
Although born in Madrid, where he spent the first two years of his life, Xaume spent the rest of his youth in Valencia and is now based in Hong Kong, from where he recently made the cover of Time Magazine with a photo, taken on 29th September 2014, of the student demonstration time in Hong Kong, known as the umbrella revolution.
Xaume, after working for several international media clients such as Getty Images, joined the AFP early in the autumn of 2014, and although prestigious, the ublication in Time is not the first of his work to appear in the international press. Olleros has seen his work published in such varied media as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Independent and Vanity Fair among others.
Xaume, who studied at Valencia’s Lycée Français, was a student of business studies at Valencia University and then worked for four years in a bank before pursuing his true love, photography (his first camera was a present from his uncle when he was 16), obtaining some work for the newspaper El Mundo and finding time to create the Photon International Festival, for which he is still a jury member. He studied Photography at ESAD in Valencia and a Master in photojournalism in Barcelona.
He was about to try his luck in London or Paris, when the Hong Kong opportunity came along, and he didn’t think twice before leaving Valencia behind, he just made up his mind about what he was going to do.
