Like I do most mornings, I combed through front pages from Newseum and Kisoko.net early on Wednesday. I expected to see large images with huge crowds on the fronts of many papers, and I did. But I also saw a few images that stood out from the Hong Kong protests because of the way they zoomed in, both conceptually and literally.
The first comes from Die Tageszeitung in Berlin, Germany:
The Sydney Morning Herald in Sydney, Australia, zoomed in, too, for a sight that feels both familiar and different from Ferguson. The two protests are not the same, of course, but there is something about seeing a person standing in defiance surrounded by tear gas that made me think of this iconic Ferguson image from Robert Cohen of The St. Louis Post-Dispatch. In this image, though, the umbrella gives it a kind of visual geo-stamp.
Finally, the International New York Times leads with an image where we see no people, just the symbol of the protests. I’m still seeing several hashtags on Twitter for the protests, including #OccupyCentral and #HongKong, but whether it lasts as one or not, we’ll probably remember what’s happening there now as the #UmbrellaRevolution. All these front pages show that.