Picture power: Tiananmen stand-off

Charlie Cole's winning photo Enlarge Image

The World Press Photo foundation celebrates the 50th anniversary of its annual photographic competition this year.

In the last of five pieces by photographers talking about their award-winning work, Charlie Cole describes how he captured the dramatic 1989 photo of a protester confronting a line of People's Liberation Army tanks in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, during demonstrations for democratic reform.

No one knows for sure what happened to the "man with the shopping bag" after he was hauled away by China's secret police, but the event provoked an international outcry.

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In May, 1989, as a contract photographer for Newsweek magazine, I was sent to Beijing where daily student protests had continued to grow in size.

Two of the magazine's other photographers, Peter Turnley and Andy Hernandez, had already put in some time there. A few days after I turned up, the protests seemed to have peaked out. Protest crowds and activity thinned to such a degree that a lot of the photographers and writers began