The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, were student-led demonstrations in Beijing which took place in the spring of 1989. The demonstrations gathered wide spread support from city residents, exposing vast scandles within China's political leadership. These demonstrations were forcibly suppressed by leaders who ordered the military to enforce martial law in the capital. On June 3-4 troops with assault rifles and tanks inflicted causalities on unarmed civilians trying to block the military's advance on Tiananmen square. The square was where students and other demonstrators had occupied for seven weeks, until the army came in and used deadly force to remove everyone. The goals the demonstrators wanted to achieve were, social equality, a "communist party without corruption", freedom of the press, freedom of speech and democracy. The result of the protest was thousands killed, and more injured with no reform, to this day the Chinese government has condemned the protest as a "counter-revolutionary riot" and has prohibited all forms of discussion or remembrance of the event what so ever. Because of this lack of information, many details such as death tolls for the event are still unknown.
The students were demonstrating for freedom of press and speech, and now the Chinese government has not just refused these two acts but also used them against the event by basically erasing all evidence of it even happening.
Jeff Widener who is an American photographer captured one of the best known images of the massacre and arguably one of the most remembered images of all time. Widener has covered many events in over 100 countries involving civil unrest and wars to social issues, and is a well known photojournalist. He majored in photojournalism before starting as a newspaper photographer in California, later he accepted a job in Belgium as a staff photographer with United Press International.
The famous 'tank man' photograph show a man who stood in front of a column of tanks on June 5, the morning after the Chinese military had suppressed the Tiananmen Square protests. There are a number of different versions of tankman taken by different photographers who were also in the same hotel balcony as Widener, the photographers all had to smuggle their film out of China as the military were destroying all film/ footage of the event, but luckily they successfully got it out and into the public eye. The captured moment of the photograph is why its such a famous image, because who in there right mind would stare down five tanks. The images itself is quite well composed, as the viewers eye moves through the whole of the image from the bottom left where the subject is and follows the line of tanks diagonally upwards throughout the image. There is a set of lights which is in the way of a perfect shot, but due to the photographers being confined to the balcony its not surprising this got in the way.Like Charlie Hebdo, this event was about free speech. But in this case, through the medium of photography Widener managed to highlight the attempted suppression of this event, and get it into the public eye. This wonderfully captured moment lives on as one of the most famous captured images, and thus in itself fights China's goal to mute freedom of speech. The photograph shown below is another one of Widener's photographing the same event but from a different point of view.
