The Price of the Gaze: Agency and Objectification in a Hong Kong Protest Photo

On a rain-slicked street in neon-drenched Hong Kong, a police officer holds out his arm, straights out his gun. Our eye is with the camera, lined up in the sight down the barrel. A young men’s body stands across from him, tank top and shorts, mouth opening, arms spreading. A furled umbrella dangles uselessly from his hand, an extension of his posture rather than a functional object. The officer’s face is cropped out; the protester’s exposed body clogs the center of the frame. This tableau is deciphered in seconds: armed state versus unarmed citizen, armored authority versus bare vulnerability. In publishing Lam Yik Fei’s photograph with Eric Nagourney’s article, “In Hong Kong, ‘Protest Photo Evokes Memories of Tiananmen Era,’” The New York Times paired it with 1989’s “Tank Man” (Nagourney). This analogy conferred instant symbolism—and, with it, unease. Why does a frame that seems to clarify and elevate the image’s political meaning also unsettle? What is the ethical price of such legibility?

The claim I advance is that the very frames that render the protester’s life publicly grievable also conscript him into a spectacle that risks effacing his particular reality. Reading Lam’s composition with Judith Butler’s account of framing, John Berger’s theory of spectatorship, and Susan Sontag’s critique of photographic consumption, I trace how journalistic and social frames move the image from situated event to symbol to meme. I then consider the pragmatic counterclaim that simplification mobilizes political action, and I respond by proposing an ethic of unsettled spectatorship: a viewer’s practice that keeps images situated, resists mythic equivalences, and pauses before circulating decontextualized icons.

Lam’s composition is already a theory of perception. We are placed behind the officer’s shoulder; his arm is a literal vector steering our gaze toward the protester. The faceless officer becomes an interchangeable agent of state power, while the protester’s exposed body is individualized and vulnerable. Judith Butler gives us language for how such visual and discursive operations work. In “Torture and the Ethics of Photography,” she argues that frames “control what is perceivable” and “perform a delimiting work, bringing into focus an image under the stipulation that part of the visual field is governed” (Butler 954). Introduced this way, Butler’s claim helps name two concurrent framings. First, the compositional frame: by excluding the officer’s face, the image suppresses his subjectivity and concentrates vulnerability on the protester’s body. Second, the discursive frame: by pairing Lam’s photo with “Tank Man,” the article relocates a chaotic, contingent encounter within a heroic narrative template that global audiences recognize.

Butler’s larger ethical point is that such frames condition whose lives are apprehended as lives and whose losses count as losses; they help confer grievability—the capacity to be mourned and cared about (954). The “Tank Man” analogy arguably does that political work: it designates the 2019 protester as the heir of a recognizable tradition of morally charged defiance. Without the analogy, he could be an anonymous figure in a street; within it, he becomes a subject with political gravity that seems to demand ethical response. Yet the same movement that authorizes attention also preselects what is seen and how. Sontag observes, in a related register, that “in a world ruled by photographic images, all borders (‘framing’) seem arbitrary. Anything can be separated, can be made discontinuous, from anything else” (Sontag 23). The analogy’s gain in recognizability risks its loss in particularity: the local specifics of August 2019 policing in Hong Kong, the close‑range threat of a pistol rather than the impersonal mass of tanks, and the protester’s singular situation all begin to recede.

If Butler clarifies how a frame delimits perception, Berger helps us reckon with the power that accrues to the one who looks. In Ways of Seeing, Berger famously writes: “Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at” (47). Berger’s formulation is gendered and grounded in the European nude, but its core structure—the division of social presence into surveyor and surveyed—travels. In Lam’s photograph, the protester is the sight, the object of vision; the armed officer, the photographer, and ultimately the global audience occupy the role of surveyor. Berger's reasoning, where one’s identity is divided between experiencing life and being seen, helps explain the discomfort we feel toward the image’s clarity. The protester’s agency is reduced to others looking at him; his presence is consumed as a sight.

Yet Berger is himself complicated by the scene. The protester, all spread limbs and mouth agape, offers presentation of his body, but a confessional performative nakedness that seems to performantize itself, aware of onlookers and cameras alike, sowing vulnerability like seeds to bring forth a specific image. To be “surveyed” by this understanding of cameras isn't simply to be passive; the body can be a medium in a new media ecology in which “A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it—by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir” (Sontag 9-10). The protester wants just that: to transmogrify the body into such a powerful sign that it may center images across instances and borders. The value of such an image, of such power, becomes apparent through Berger’s distinction between nakedness and nudity. “To be naked is to be oneself,” Berger writes. “To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself” (54). Lam’s subject is “naked” in one sense—stripped of armor, materially exposed—but his exposure is immediately processed for spectatorship. The image—especially once coupled to “Tank Man”—renders his nakedness a kind of political nudity: a body on display, optimized for recognition as a symbol. The price of the gaze is this conversion: person into sign, presence into representation.

Sontag’s account of photography’s social metabolism describes what happens next. “To collect photographs is to collect the world,” she writes, diagnosing the “aesthetic consumerism” that makes us “image‑junkies” in industrial societies (3–4, 24). Photographs “furnish evidence” (5) and offer a “pseudo‑presence and a token of absence” (16); above all, they circulate, and in circulating, they change. Lam’s photograph’s afterlife traces a now‑familiar arc. Stage one is news. The image appears tethered to the reportorial context that names the place (Hong Kong), the date (August 2019), and the incident (“Don’t shoot,” the protester reportedly said; after a scuffle, “one officer fired a warning shot into the air” and “another officer fell”; an officer “kicked the man in the torso”; Nagourney). The frame here is journalistic and temporal: a “privileged moment” (Sontag 18) that, once recorded, “confers on the event a kind of immortality” (Sontag 11). Stage two is symbol. As the photo gets retweeted and embedded with the “Tank Man” caption, it becomes an emblem of defiance; what Sontag calls the “privileged moment” (18) detaches from its particular causes and effects to stand for a general meaning. Stage three is meme. The composition—outstretched arms versus outstretched arm — becomes a template. Faces can be swapped; the pistol can be replaced by a banana; the scene can be re‑captioned to satirize anything. The image, newly “collectable” (Sontag 4), becomes unsituated content.

Sontag warns that this relentless packaging has ethical consequences. First, it flattens response: “Images transfix. Images anesthetize” (20). The first time we see an atrocity photograph, we feel a “negative epiphany”; after repetition, we experience “a saturation point” (20–21). Second, it miseducates conscience: photographs can “goad” yet “never be ethical or political knowledge,” producing “a knowledge at bargain prices — a semblance of knowledge, a semblance of wisdom” (Sontag 24). We can see both dangers in Lam’s photo’s afterlife. As the image becomes a “portable kit” (Sontag 8) deployed to score points or express generic solidarity, both the protester’s particular risk (a body in immediate jeopardy at close range) and the local dynamics (Hong Kong’s post‑handover legal regime; the specifics of August 2019 policing) recede. The very capacity of the camera to confer importance by persuading us that time consists of “interesting events, events worth photographing” (Sontag 11) is hijacked by virality’s indifference to context.

There is, however, a pragmatic rejoinder: images are tools of mobilization. If the “Tank Man” frame made more people care, donate, or join protests; if the meme kept Hong Kong on international feeds; if simplification gave exhausted organizers a usable emblem—then perhaps the tradeoff is justified. Political movements have always crafted icons to compress complexity into action‑driving forms. Two replies follow from the theorists at hand. First, Butler would ask us to notice which frames make which lives grievable and at what price. If grievability requires conversion into a familiar myth (the lone defier versus the state machine), then actors whose realities do not fit that myth risk invisibility. Second, Sontag would caution that the very strategy that mobilizes today may deplete ethical attention tomorrow: “the vast photographic catalogue of misery” can “make the horrible seem more ordinary” (21). The long‑term cost is compassion fatigue and a public trained to process struggle as interchangeable iconography. When “everything exists to end in a photograph” (24), particularity — the ground of genuine understanding — erodes.

Frames both bolster and skew; the camera both informs and anesthetizes. Therefore, forget what we should do. Wonder instead what we should watch. We should neither pretend to escape the frame, nor to avoid the image. Instead, we should practice an ethic of unsettled viewing viewing practice premised on doubt, specificity, sharing restraint and through it keeping images in place through facilitating surrounding details before sharing: Who made this image? Where and when? What does the accompanying reporting say? Which elements of the composition are products of selection (for example, the officer’s missing face), and what does that selection do? To resist mythic equivalences, we can treat analogies like “Tank Man” as hypotheses rather than facts, asking what the analogy clarifies and what it erases; we can look for what in this scene is not like the template. To attend to agency as well as vulnerability, we can hold in view both the protester’s strategic self‑exposure and his irreducible personhood, refusing to let performative potency cancel the individual life whose stakes are immediate and unrepeatable. To pause before memefying, we can remember Sontag’s insistence that all photographs are “memento mori” (15) and that photographing is “an act of non‑intervention” (12); in our era, reposting may be the default non‑intervention, and a brief ethical pause—especially when humor or decontextualization is involved —acknowledges that sometimes not sharing is a form of care.

Nagourney’s article notes that after the standoff, the protester slipped away (Nagourney). The photograph, however, outlasts him—and us. Following Butler, we can appreciate how a frame makes his life legible as grievable; following Berger, we can register the price of that legibility in objectification; following Sontag, we can track the image’s transit from news to symbol to meme and anticipate the ethical numbness that transit breeds. The paradox is not one we solve, but one we must dwell in. In that sense this project rests finally in a policy/procedure stasis: the most consequential decision is not only what to do with such images but how to choose to watch them. An ethic of unsettled spectatorship — situated, wary of myth, attentive to agency, and restrained in circulation — will not restore a flattened truth. But it may preserve our capacity to meet, in an image‑saturated world, the particular reality of others with the seriousness it deserves.

Works Cited

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. Penguin Books, 1972

Butler, Judith. “Torture and the Ethics of Photography.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 25, no. 6, 2007, pp. 951-966.

Nagourney, Eric. “In Hong Kong, Protest Photo Evokes Memories of Tiananmen Era.” The New York Times, 26 Aug. 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/26/world/asia/viral-hong-kong-protest-photo.html.

Sontag, Susan. “In Plato’s Cave.” On Photography, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977, pp. 3-24.