Making of ‘Tiananmen’ (by Stuart Franklin, 1989), 2013

The story behind the photograph…

On the morning of June 5th, 1989, Franklin captured the photograph following the army's brutal suppression of student protesters in Tiananmen Square the previous day. Present in the Beijing Hotel alongside Franklin were three other photographers who also documented the same moment: AP photographer Jeff Widener, Newsweek photographer Charlie Cole (who shared a balcony with Franklin), and Reuters photographer Arthur Tsang. These images, disseminated worldwide on front pages the next day, faced the threat of destruction by Chinese security forces. Cole resorted to hiding his film in the bathroom cistern, while Franklin, fortunate in his circumstances, entrusted his film to someone bound for Paris, successfully evading any complications. The film was ingeniously smuggled out in a packet of tea by a French student and delivered to the Magnum office in Paris. Franklin's photograph earned him a World Press Photo Award in 1989 and secured a place in LIFE magazine's '100 Photos that Changed the World' in 2003. Despite the subsequent fame of the image, Franklin, reflecting on his current response to it, expressed a sense of being emotionally spent: "I'm sort of reacted out, if I'm honest. I looked at it today, and although the latent emotion is still there, I don't deal with this on a day-to-day basis."