Hi Bob,
I spent a week in Tiananmen Square that Spring, but stupidly
stupidly stupidly left town a few days before June 4th -- on a
plane full of other stupid press people who thought, like me, that
the action in the square would continue to fizzle out in an
undramatic fashion.
A friend of mine, Charlie Cole, was one of only three photographers
to get that shot of the young guy in front of the tanks. All three
photographers were on the balcony of Charlie's room in the Beijing
Hotel, photographing despite live ammuniction fired on them from
soldiers in a government building accros the road, on the other
side of Chang-an avenue. Stuart Franklin of Magnum was one of the
others -- his black & white shot is famous now, but Charlie's was
in colour -- and sharp, unlike the third guy's picture -- and that
won him World Press Photo of the year -- despite the fact that the
collapse of the Berlin Wall a few months after Tiananmen did what
we at the time thought was impossible, putting Tiananmen in the
shade.
Charlie had been out all night the night before, the night of June
4th -- only to come back to the hotel and have all his film taken
away by the police in the hotel lobby. When he photographed the man
and the tanks, he knew he had to protect it, so he rewound the
film, stuck it in a canister -- and hid it in the toilet cistern in
his room. Then he put another film in the camera and fired off a
dozen frames of nothing. Seconds later, the goons broke down the
hotel room door down and confiscated 'the film'.
ron
