browseTen Days in Tiananmen Square by Bob Gannon
4 December 1999 to 23 January 2000
Photography can be an excuse. It's the excuse I had to get me to a country I have always wanted to see. Like many people, I never thought that that desire would be realised (for many it never will). You can read about countries, have thoughts about distant lands, build pre and misconceptions about nations and their cultures, yet nothing can compare with the experience of actually being there. Only then can a place truly get to work on your senses.
And I arrived, for so short a period, at yet another tumultuous time in the history of that vast country. A time when a pro-democracy movement had taken to the streets of the capital, spearheaded by the country's future - its educated youth.
I thought I was prepared for many surprises: the foot bound octogenarians hobbling down the Donchang'an Jie; the surreal dance of the practitioners of Tai chi; the countless bicycles and the symphony of their bells; and that ever present government voice I'd read about, bellowing from the speakers around Tiananmen Square, telling the students that they must return to their homes. Everything seemed exotic and strange but never wholly threatening. The army was there - the army who, I was authoritatively told would never shoot the people - an ever-present spectre whose profile increased ominously in those final days. But I was not prepared - hopelessly ill prepared, in fact (as were many people) for the bloody denouement of this particular saga.
The young boy soldier talking to the residents early in the morning of June 3rd. (The army had again failed to take Tiananmen, attempting this time to storm the square on foot. The young conscripts, seemingly confused and obviously exhausted, had yet again been repelled by the huge number of people in the square.) I photographed the boy soldier. But he became agitated and self-conscious, turning his face from my camera, from my eye. 24 hours later I would have witnessed the brutal death of several boys like him at the hands of the people, who were themselves to be butchered in unknown numbers by the might of military bullets and tanks.
My camera carried me around in those final days. It led me - in the defiance of martial law (who was taking martial law seriously, anyway?) - on the student marches around central Beijing; to the campus of the city's university; to the Monument of the Heroes in Tiananmen Square, where student leaders would make their speeches proclaiming their demands for the immediate future. And what happened to my student friend who had worked in the Square's information and propaganda tent, and who had arranged to meet me on that fateful night of the 3rd so that I could sample the delights of traditional Peking duck before my return to the West? There had been no word, no sign. Just the silence and the government pronouncements and, of course, the rumours. Can this exhibition convey the atmosphere of those ten days in Tiananmen Square during the late spring of 1989? I hope so. For this is where I went and this is some of what I saw. Bob Gannon - September 1989.