FREEDOM FIGHTERS: OSLO 2019

In May 2019 I travelled to Oslo for the Human Rights Foundation's Oslo Freedom Forum, the annual gathering that brings dissidents, journalists, and pro-democracy activists from around the world onto one stage under the theme 'Unite'. I wasn't there on assignment. I went with a self-initiated project called Freedom Fighters: a set of formal studio portraits of the people who spend their lives pushing back against authoritarian power, shot with the same care and attention a magazine would give a head of state.

The project happened to coincide with Fujifilm's launch of the GFX 50S, at the time a genuinely new category of camera: a medium format digital body priced and sized for working photographers rather than studio specialists. I contacted Fujifilm directly about what I was planning to shoot in Oslo, and they lent me a GFX 50S body and a set of lenses for the month. The extra resolution and tonal range of the medium format sensor were suited to exactly this kind of work: plain black backdrops, hard directional light, and faces that needed to hold up as large, considered prints rather than disposable event photography.

Working across the three days of the forum, I pulled speakers aside between sessions for a few minutes each in front of a portable black backdrop, the same setup repeated for a North Korean defector, a Uyghur attorney, a Somali educator, a Cuban journalist, and dozens of others whose day jobs put them in direct conflict with the governments they were raised under.

The portrait that has stayed with me most is of Denise Ho Wan-see, the Cantonese pop star turned pro-democracy and LGBTQI activist. I photographed her minutes before she walked on stage to deliver 'Under the Umbrella: Creative Dissent in Hong Kong', a talk about the 2014 Umbrella Movement and the risk of speaking out against Beijing as a public figure. Within months of that talk, the Hong Kong protests of 2019 erupted, and Denise Ho became one of their most visible international faces. Looking back at the frame now, taken in the quiet minutes before she stepped into that role, is one of the more strange and privileged moments of my career.

Freedom Fighters was never commissioned and was never meant to be. It was a chance to point a genuinely exceptional camera, on loan for exactly this reason, at the people the Oslo Freedom Forum exists to platform, and to give them the same unhurried, formal treatment usually reserved for people with far more institutional power than they have.