At first, Jeff Widener was annoyed by the man entering his shot.
Widener, a photographer with the Associated Press, was focusing his camera on a line of tanks in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square when out of the blue came this man in a white shirt and dark trousers, carrying what appeared to be shopping bags.
Widener thought the man was going to mess up the composition of his frame.
Little did he know that he was about to make one of the most iconic photos in history.
Before “Tank Man,” pro-democracy demonstrators had been occupying Tiananmen Square for weeks. Here, a young woman is caught between civilians and Chinese soldiers who were trying to remove her from an assembly near the Great Hall of the People on June 3, 1989.
Protesters stand on an armored vehicle on the day China started cracking down on demonstrations.
It was June 5, 1989, a day after Chinese troops began violently cracking down on pro-democracy demonstrators who had been in the square for over a month.
Widener had been in Beijing for a week to cover the protests, and he was hurt when the deadly crackdown began.
