Tiananmen Square Tank Man photographer Charlie Cole dies in Bali (original) (raw)

American photojournalist Charlie Cole, whose career will forever be associated with an iconic photograph of the “Tank Man”, the Chinese office worker facing down a column of tanks during the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, died in Bali last week.

Cole, 64, a Bali resident for more than 15 years, was one of four cameramen who took similar shots of the scene – his taken with a telephoto lens from a Beijing Hotel balcony – but it was his tight framing of the event that is believed to have won him the 1990 World Press Photo of the Year award.

Cole later recalled watching the man in a white shirt walk into the centre of Changan Avenue as the armoured vehicles approached: “I kept shooting in anticipation of what I felt was his certain doom. But to my amazement the lead tank stopped, then tried to move around him.”

Eventually, Public Security Bureau agents intervened and hurried the man away. Even to this day, the identity and fate of the “tank man” are still not clear and the image remains largely blocked on the internet in China.

Charlie Cole, right and James Nachtwey, left, working during South Korea’s first free election campaign in 1987. Photo: Kim Newton

“I think his action captured peoples’ hearts everywhere and when the moment came, his character defined the moment, rather than the moment defining him,” Cole once told The New York Times. “He made the image. I was just one of the photographers. And I felt honoured to be there.”