BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Picture power: Tiananmen stand-off (original) (raw)

The World Press Photo foundation celebrates the 50th anniversary of its annual photographic competition this year.

In the last of five pieces by photographers talking about their award-winning work, Charlie Cole describes how he captured the dramatic 1989 photo of a protester confronting a line of People's Liberation Army tanks in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, during demonstrations for democratic reform.

No one knows for sure what happened to the "man with the shopping bag" after he was hauled away by China's secret police, but the event provoked an international outcry.

In May, 1989, as a contract photographer for Newsweek magazine, I was sent to Beijing where daily student protests had continued to grow in size.

Two of the magazine's other photographers, Peter Turnley and Andy Hernandez, had already put in some time there. A few days after I turned up, the protests seemed to have peaked out. Protest crowds and activity thinned to such a degree that a lot of the photographers and writers began to head back to their respective bases in the Asian region.

I was told by Newsweek to stay on. On the evening of 3 June, after a day of tense confrontations between the People's Liberation Army (PLA) and the demonstrators, the army began to encircle the inner city and eventually began to try to move tanks and Armoured Personnel Carriers (APCs) down into the heart of Tiananmen Square.

At the top of the square just in front of the Forbidden City, an APC got separated from its column, and in its panic to get out of the crowd area, ran over several demonstrators. This, in turn, caused the crowd to grow violent.

They disabled the APC, tore its crew from the vehicle, killed them, and torched the vehicle. All this was done in plain view of several PLA platoons about 150 metres away at the edge of the square. Standing beside the burning APC, I looked down the avenue and in the orange glow of the lights of the square I could see the PLA lock and load their AK-47s.

Secret police

I looked around for cover but there was none - the only areas that offered any protection were back up Changan Avenue near the Beijing Hotel. About the time I reached some trees along the avenue the soldiers opened up on the crowd at the top of the square. There was panic as people were being hit.

It was impossible for me to shoot pictures as it was too dark and using a flash was out of the question. I looked around and decided that about the only shot left was from the roof of a building with a long exposure of the square and the mayhem.

I went into the Beijing Hotel, which had a commanding view of the top of the square, but when I went in, I was tackled by members of the Public Security Bureau (PSB), China's secret police.

One of the PSB ran up to me with a electric cattle prod and hit me in the side with it. Others punched and kicked at me. They ripped my photo vest off me and took all the film I had shot that evening. They were going to keep the cameras but I convinced them they were useless without film, so they returned them and I told them I was going to my room.

The PSB had missed three rolls of unexposed film in an inside pocket of the photo vest.

Wounded

While hurrying through the lobby, I ran into my friend Stuart Franklin, a Magnum photographer on assignment for Time magazine. Stuart had a room at the hotel on about the eighth floor, and from the balcony we had a pretty good look at what was happening.

By this time there was a fair amount of automatic weapons fire and I could see people with carts carrying wounded and dead running down the avenue trying to get the wounded to the hospital.

I counted 64 wounded or killed in a short span of time then stopped counting. Stuart and I tried to shoot with the available street light, but it yielded very little.

At about four or five in the morning, tank columns raced into the square smashing buses, bicycles and humans under their treads. As the sun began to rise, we could see the mass of armour in the square, escorted by thousands of PLA troops.

The following day - 5 June - Stuart and I found ourselves on the balcony again.

As the morning progressed, hundreds of soldiers now lined the entrances to the square and hunkered down behind barricades. Their rifles were trained down at curious students and residents 100 metres down the street.

On nearly every rooftop, including our own, we could see PSB agents with binoculars and radios trying to get control of the area. About noon, we heard the APCs start up and begin to leave the square. In order to clear Changan Avenue some of the machine-gunners opened up on the crowd, people fled again in panic.

Where there had been hundreds of people just moments before, were only deserted bicycles and burned-out buses.

Man with a shopping bag

Shortly afterwards, a column of about 25 tanks began to roll down the same lane. Stuart and I were shooting shoulder to shoulder as they made their way down the avenue. Then suddenly from the roadside, we saw a young man, with a jacket in one hand and a shopping bag in the other, step into the path of the tanks in an attempt to halt them.

It was an incredible thing to do, especially in light of what had just happened with the APC machine-gunners. I couldn't really believe it, I kept shooting in anticipation of what I felt was his certain doom.

To my amazement, the lead tank stopped, then tried to move around him but the young man cut it off again. Finally the PSB grabbed him and ran away with him. Stuart and I looked at each other in somewhat disbelief at what we had just seen and photographed.

Later, Stuart left to go to Beijing University and I stayed behind to see what else might happen. Shortly after he left, PSB agents crashed through our hotel room door. Four agents swept in and assaulted me while a few others grabbed my cameras.

They ripped the film from my cameras and confiscated my passport. They then forced me to write a statement that I was photographing during martial law, which unbeknown to me carried a hefty prison sentence. They then put a guard at the door.

I had hidden the roll with the tank pictures in its plastic film can in the holding tank of the toilet. When they left, I retrieved it and later made my way to AP to develop and transmit it to Newsweek in New York.

Three other photographers also have the shot from different angles.

Numerous inquiries have been made by various agencies and magazines trying to uncover the young man's identity and find out what happened to him. I've seen a number of accounts that name him as Wang Wei Lin, but that isn't a certainty.

Personally I think the government most likely executed him. It would have been in the government's interest to produce him to silence the outcry from most of the world. But, they never could. People were executed at that time for far less than what he did.

I think his action captured people's hearts everywhere, and when the moment came his character defined the moment rather than the moment defining him. He made the image, I just took the picture. I felt honoured to be there.