In late September 2014, outside the government headquarters in Admiralty, Hong Kong photojournalist Adrian Yu raised his camera for a moment no one had planned. A young protester had just taken pepper spray to the eyes and was crying out that he had been standing nowhere near the police line, when a riot officer in a gas mask patted his shoulder, took out his own water bottle, and began rinsing the young man’s eyes clean.
Adrian pressed the shutter and kept working. He did not think at the time that he had done anything special. Then the picture was published, and it traveled farther than anything he had shot before: through the Facebook page of The Epoch Times‘ Hong Kong edition and media company, into more than a million news feeds, and on to readers far beyond the city.
I spoke with Adrian on a video call held together by a live-translation app that insisted on mixing my English and its own Chinese rendering into a single stream, so for the first few minutes he heard two languages at once and politely asked me to repeat myself. A colleague stepped in and taught us both to speak in short passages and leave room for the machine to catch up. It was a fitting handicap. We were about to talk about what machines can and cannot do.
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