A single man against the juggernaut of the state,
Hercules saving Rome.
You know, whatever, it’s one of these sort of
emblematic historical moments;
a single man, defiant, courageous against an army.
[Developing News]
You mean I’ve got to say, “I’m Stuart Franklin?” Oh, no.
Seriously?
-Ready? -Yeah.
I’m Stuart Franklin, and we’re going to talk about Tiananmen Square
and the photographs that I took back in 1989.
This was taken before the crackdown.
And it's a summer storm, which you sometimes get in Beijing.
People are overnighting in the square.
So there's a lot of sleeping bags, a lot of banners and flags.
And he just suddenly stands up, and I’m right in front of him,
and so capture that moment.
But it seems one of the things that
as a still photographer you try to do within a news event
is to somehow capture the emotion of the day.
And somehow, there was a lot of emotion.
People were committed to trying to take a stand.
The photograph, the moment had quite a lot of symbolism.
In the east, in Asia, the idea of baring your chest to the enemy
is something that, you know,
we read about with the Japanese invasions in China in the 1930s.
You know, there’s enough space around him to give him a voice.
And you can see the monument to the people’s heroes,
you’ve got plenty of skies.
There’s a long history to foreboding and stormy skies
in art and literature.
That’s delivering, in this case, particularly good light.
You’ve got deep, dark gray skies behind him, and he’s, you know,
got this sort of victory sign.
This is the day after the crackdown,
a kind of protest assembled in the morning.
And they wanted to clear that,
so they started shooting over their heads.
People got killed, were carried away on trishaws.
We were lying down on the balcony because we were kind of a target,
as the media up on these balconies.
So we were lying down to avoid the possibility of being hit.
I was conscious to try and set the scene a little bit
by showing the four tanks, the smoke,
and these kind of strange lane markings that seem to sort of
bring some context to the picture.
And, of course, the bus in the background.
So, the framing of the picture was...
it’s always going through my head at some level,
you know, because framing is not just about aesthetics,
it’s about storytelling.
The first image, you can see a vehicle burning,
two rows of soldiers in firing positions,
protesters being shot at,
protesters backing away,
the tanks preparing to move through.
This one here, you can actually see
in front of the row of tanks, the guy is standing there.
He stood stock still for a while as the tanks came towards him.
But as they moved, he kind of followed around.
And then, legs astride, dancing around the tank.
The tank’s trying to move right,
he’s moving in that direction.
At one point, he climbed on top of the lead tank, onto the turret,
and started speaking to the tank driver.
It’s quite possible that he was one of the protesters
trying to find out what had happened
and wanted to carry on asking, you know,
where his relatives were or where his brother was
or where his friends were.
Eventually, I think it was three people
cleared him to the other side of the road,
after which we never saw from him again.
After taking this image, the main aim was to try and hide the film
because very often people want your film.
People want to delete the images on your camera, it’s really annoying.
And unfortunately, you know,
our job in the world of journalism is
to try and keep that film from being taken or destroyed.
So, I packed the film into a little box of tea,
and then it went out to
The following day, when George Bush saw it,
George Bush senior, this is,
he pointed to this guy and said, “Oh, what a courageous person he is.”
And the image sort of went viral,
although, of course, there was no Internet in those days.
But it went viral in terms of the fact that
everybody wanted the photograph.
And it became a very useful event politically,
both for the Chinese and for the Republican Party,
because in a sense, it was all about restraint.
They didn’t kill him, there he is,
you know, they’ve had a reasonable conversation with him on the balcony.
And it managed to play itself over the top of all the pictures of
dead bodies in the hospitals and all the pictures in the morgues
and all the pictures of the wounded and dying on the streets.
We don’t see those images, what we see is this.
So what it’s done is it’s softened the imagery of the Beijing crackdown.
You know, the whole event has been subsumed...
silenced, airbrushed out of Chinese history.
Over time, photographs change their relevance or their documentary value,
so that photograph has suddenly become relevant.
It's important, you know,
documentary is not just about the extraordinary.
It's also about the ordinary.