A painting of me

Magnum photographer Stuart Franklin discusses his photograph, Tiananmen Square June 4th, 1989. ⇒

   2 June 2009, mid-morning

There are two shots of the Tank Man that people propbably remember, Franklin's is the wider angle of the two. (The other was taken by Jeff Widener.) My favourite shot by Franklin is of a student in Tiananmen Square during the hunger strike.

This is a post from my link log: If you click the title of this post you will be taken the web page I am discussing.

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Comments

  1. My parents took me to my first protest march in Hong Kong the week following the incidents. To this day, the Chinese government refused to admit that anyone was killed.

    There’s a whole generation of people in mainland raised on the denial of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

    You can’t even publish these photos in Hong Kong, let alone China. The only paper that would publish articles or photos like these in Hong Kong has been banned in China for the past decade. Custom routinely confiscates any publication by Atnext media because of its “treason” tendency.

  2. Some more photos (and articles in Chinese)

    And to make it easier for non-chinese readers to navigate the website, here are the links to some video footage shot by Hong Kong media about June 4, 1989.

    Hong Kong media coverage

    Operation Yellowbird

    The Tank Man

    20th anniversary

  3. Thanks Tiff. Frontline made a documentary about the Tank Man. According to Tyler Frontline only makes good documentaries. He’s probably right. There is also the The Gate of Heavenly Peace, which I saw a million years ago and remember as being amazing. (Though, I seem to recall it being controversial because of the way it portrayed Chai Ling. Wikipedia confirms!)

  4. Lost Memory of Tiananmen. Reminds me of this story about the Chinese Censor who let a story about June 4th slip because he didn’t know anything about the massacre. They published: “Paying tribute to the strong(-willed) mothers of June 4 victims”.

  5. NYT’s Lens discusses the Tank Man image, looking at 4 versions of the famous image.

  6. China’s Tiananmen generation speaks.

  7. The great Tiananmen taboo.. It is 20 years since students and lecturers filled Tiananmen Square, demanding democracy, only to be crushed by tanks and fired on by the Chinese army. Banned novelist Ma Jian, who was there at the protests, returned to Beijing to find a country desperate to erase all memories of the thousands of innocent lives lost

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