W–007 · Documentary photograph and sources

The Man Before the Tanks

On 5 June 1989, an unidentified man carrying two bags stopped in front of a column of tanks on Beijing’s Chang’an Avenue. The lead tank tried to drive around him. He moved with it and blocked its path again. He climbed onto the vehicle and addressed its crew. Two people then led him away from the road.

An unidentified man carrying bags stands in front of a tank column on Beijing’s Chang’an Avenue. Photograph by Jeff Widener / Associated Press, 5 June 1989.

Provenance and sources for frame 1

Jeff Widener made the photograph for Associated Press. The digital file comes from his official website; the National Gallery of Art holds a print, 2018.177.631. The image remains under copyright. Displayed file: 1912 × 1286 pixels. The source identifies this image as copyrighted. Full image record in Russian.

jeffwidener.com nga.gov time.com View image file

During the night of 3–4 June, troops suppressing the protests in Beijing fired on people. The exact death toll remains unknown. The man with the bags stepped out before the tanks near the Beijing Hotel. Photographers watched from the hotel balconies.

Jeff Widener, working for Associated Press, photographed from the sixth floor, some eight hundred metres from the column. He had smuggled his long-lens camera past security. At the hotel he discovered that he had run out of film. An American student, Kirk Martsen, found a single roll of colour Fuji; Widener made three exposures with it. Only one, he later said, was sharp.

Martsen helped get the film out, hiding it in his clothes, cycling away and delivering it to the AP bureau in Beijing’s diplomatic quarter. Within hours the picture reached newsrooms; on 6 June it appeared on newspaper front pages around the world. Widener’s agency image travelled especially widely. Stuart Franklin, Charlie Cole and Arthur Tsang photographed from neighbouring rooms. Together with television footage, their pictures preserve successive moments of the scene and what followed.

The English-language press named the stranger “Tank Man.” Stories supplied a name, Wang Weilin, reported an execution or proposed lives he might have led after June 1989. Open records confirm neither the name nor those accounts of his fate. The identities of the two people who led him away are also unknown: they might have been passers-by, protesters or officials. His actions before the tanks are on film. His biography has not been recovered.

1. The man before the tanks