Tibetan supporter
Last year, San Francisco (and much of the world) was getting ready for the summer Olympics in Beijing. San Francisco had vied for the honor of hosting the games but was beat out by, well several cities actually. We didn’t make it into the final rounds of consideration.
But, we still had the privilege of having the torch travel through our city. The nature of what that honor represented however, was brought into question by supporters of the Tibetan freedom movement. The Olympic torch, on its way to Beijing, was slated to go right through the Tibetan plateau. This was, by some accounts, a smack right straight in the face to the Tibetans by the Chinese who, from the same viewpoint, have occupied and irreprably damaged Tibet and its culture.
And so, in Europe and elsewhere, the Olympic torch relay had had its share of troubles and it was shaping up that San Francisco would be the scene of a pretty large clash. Here we have a very large Chinese population (especially when you add in all the folks who were bussed in from throughout the state by Chinese supporters) and you also have a very liberal population – one with a definite bias towards a free Tibet.
I spent a few hours with the crowds, photographing Chinese and Tibetan supporters as they marched, demonstrated, and participated in the freedoms we enjoy so much here in San Francisco. It really was a brilliant day with only one thing missing – the Olympic torch. It seems the City deemed it better to shuffle it off to another part of town without telling any of the masses who came to see it and express their views; or to any of the news media for that matter, who were gathered around looking rather lost. It was incredibly disappointing.
This photo I like as a portrait of a protestor: The masked face, the distant gaze, the hat pulled low over the face. I also like the framing and composition of the shot. IT was rather difficult moving among the crowds taking photos – and in this photo I used my 80-200mm zoom lens – a great lens, but one which really draws the subject near making shots like this difficult to achieve in such a crowded space. I was shooting at aperture priority, looking for a narrow depth of field to keep only the one person in focus and I think I did a reasonably good job (the focus is just a shy too narrow, favoring the closer side of his face).
It’s hard to believe that this was already a year ago, this week.
