“On the evening of the 3rd June, I was halfway through a meal in the Beijing
Hotel when troops began their final assault on Tiananmen. I grabbed my cameras,
food unfinished and went out into the night. Tear gas already hung heavy in the
streets. I saw much bloodshed, trauma and atrocity over the next few hours. I
was beaten several times, once trying to prevent an attack by an angry mob upon
a young soldier. I also lost many rolls of film to what I assumed were plain
clothed security personnel who frisked me and beat me about the face and body
for taking pictures of injured troops. It was a toxic working environment.
Dangerous, forlorn and unpredictable. By morning it was virtually over. The
streets were littered with the detritus of riot, mayhem and death. Tiananmen
Square was back in the control of the authorities. The protests had ended. The
rest, as they say, was history.” – Robert Croma
In May 1989, then 30-year-old British
photographer Robert Croma headed to China to see for himself the student
protest movement that gripped Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. The trip was mostly self-financed. Croma was advised
against the idea by news desks in New York and London and told that “the
Tiananmen story was over.” He went anyway.
“Initially, there was a tremendous festive spirit
amidst the occupation of the square,” writes Croma in an interview via email.
“Nothing palpably menacing at all. People were open and at ease. I spent many
nights in Tiananmen, talking and eating with students, photographing and
sleeping in some of the makeshift tents. Nearing the end of May, rumours began
circulating that troops would soon come and attempt to clear the square. I
received information from student sources about troop movements around Beijing.
In early June, I took a cab to the outskirts of the city and discovered many
troops stationed along the roads. I got the immediate impression something
conclusive was soon to happen.”
“In the day or so before the PLA’s final assault on
Tiananmen, there was some minor skirmishing between protesters and a contingent
of troops who had moved closer to the square. But nothing that indicated what
was about to unfold. The final assault on the night of the 3-4 June was swift,
brutal and decisive. I saw numerous people killed, both protesters and
soldiers. Although rioting and skirmishes continued throughout the night, the
occupation was effectively over by first light.”
“The most remembered image from that
period is of the man facing down the PLA tank, which was photographed from a window of the Beijing
Hotel by several photographers a day after the final assault on Tiananmen. It’s
an iconic image that has escaped the confines of its own event, to fly freely
down the years and into the psyche of the human narrative.”
Croma discovered photography the 1980s. After
initially using a camera borrowed from a friend, he began photographing news
and political events around London. After a time he was able to self-finance
trips abroad as a full-time freelance photojournalist, spending time in the
Middle East, Latin America and Eastern Germany before the fall of the Berlin
Wall.
“In the 1990s I spent some months in Nicaragua,
ostensibly to photograph social conditions in the north of the country,”
remembers Croma. “I had a number of commissions from European magazines to
fulfill. But the longer I remained in Nicaragua, the more difficult I was
finding it to motivate myself journalistically. At sunrise one day, beside the
waters of the Río Grande de Matagalpa, I had a sudden yet decisive realization
of the impossibility of taking another photograph. The following day, I
impulsively gave away all my camera equipment to an impoverished farming family
I’d been staying with in the north of the country. It was many years before I
felt the creative urge to photograph again.”
“My sudden and complete detachment from
photojournalism also included a total disregard for my negatives and
transparencies from my journalistic years. I simply walked away from it all.
For decades I believed most of the work lost forever, as indeed, much of it
seems to be. Fortunately, bits and pieces have resurfaced in recent years,
chiefly in the form of old prints preserved by others. These include an
incomplete set of impressions from the student protests of 1989 Beijing, a
selection of which is shown here.”
Looking back at his pictures a quarter century later,
Croma finds it hard to reconcile the China of today with those scenes from the
square that he captured on black and white film. “Such a swift transformation
seemed wholly inconceivable in 1989,” he states. “Of course, it can now be
argued that the Tiananmen student protests were indeed an impetus to China’s
meteoric economic rise.”
“My images are backstory and record. I almost can’t
remember taking them, but their presence all these years later perhaps defies
the vagaries of time and memory to hopefully give an impressionistic poetry of
generous intent and visual grace.”
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All images © Robert Croma
