This is Charlie Cole's shot of this (in)famous incident during the crushing of the student democracy movement in Tiananmen Square in Beijing by the Chinese Communist government and the "People's Liberation Army." Cole, shooting for Newsweek, was one of four news photographers whose images, taken from balconies of the Beijing Hotel, captured this event -- an anonymous young man with nothing but a coat and two shopping bags stopping a line of PLA tanks -- and informed a shocked and disbelieving world.
The Lens weblog of The New York Times has a great set of features including e-mailed recollections of each of the four as well as the first ever publication of a fifth shot, by an Associated Press reporter taken from street level just before the tanks reached the still unidentified man.
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