The photojournalist american Charlie Cole , author of the historic photo "a Man of the tank" of Tiananmen square, died last week in Bali (Indonesia), according to the independent newspaper South China Morning Post (PMDS).
Cole, 64 years of age and resident in Bali for the past 15, was one of the cameramen who took pictures of the scene from the balcony of a hotel in Beijing: he and his famous photo won the World Press Photo of 1989.
In the instant, gave the round-the-world and became one of the photos of the most iconic of the last century , appear man planted in front of a column of armoured on the avenue pequinesa of Chang'an, such as protest individual , after that hundreds of young people die in the square hours before.
In an interview with Efe made a decade ago, Cole explained that he took the photo with a Nikon and a lens of 300 millimeters, from a balcony that was very far away, approximately 200 meters of the scene ", from the room of Stuart Franklin, on the eighth floor of the hotel."
After you have dispersed the people who had returned to the plaza that morning, a column of 25 tanks advanced down the avenue. " nothing appeared in the young , with a jacket in one hand and a bag in the other, and stood in front of the tanks. I could not believe it. But I kept shooting convinced that would kill . To my amazement, the tank is stopped" , explained the photographer.
Then, in anticipation of the Police , the previous night assaulted him with an electric cattle prod in the reception of the hotel, hid the reels in the cistern of the toilet.
just last June, met thirty years of the Tiananmen massacre , an event that to this day the Government continues to recognize , avoiding responsibilities, denying the evidence and criminalizing the victims of the repression which put an end to the student demonstrations.
In fact, until today, the identity and the fate of the "man of the tank" are not yet clear and the image remains locked in the censored chinese networks.
Born in Bonham (Texas, USA), Cole graduated in journalism at the University of Texas at Denton, in 1978 and, thanks to the profession of military of his father, his work was linked frequently with the army, covering conflicts as the uprising of the filipino people in 1985, or the student demonstrations in South Korea of the mid-eighties.
After a traffic accident, his leg was shattered and he ended up changing his profession for commercial photography.
Date Of Update: 13 September 2019, 15:01
