Title: CHINE 89 - LES 55 JOURS DE PÉKIN PAR 7 PHOTOGRAPHES CHINOIS
Photographer(s): Davy, Hei Bai, Pascal G.,Wu Yue, Xavier, Zong Hoi Yi, Gabriel.
Writer(s): Ya Ding, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Danièle Elisseeff, Christian Caujolle, Alain Peyraube, Pierre Hurel
Designer(s): Olivier Bourgeois, Vincent Léry
Publisher(s): Flammarion, Paris, France
Year: 1989
Print run:
Language(s): French
Pages: 124
Size: 28,5 x 38 cm
Binding: Softcover
Edition:
Print: Aubin, Paris, France
Nation(s) and year(s) of Protest: China,1989
ISBN: 9782080100399
It is very rare in recent history that a nation's photographers have themselves recorded the historical upheavals experienced by their people. Collecting the images of Agence VU's Chinese photographers on the fifty-five days of wild hope for freedom and then bloody drama that recently shook China is first and foremost a testimony that we publish, but it is also evidence of the explicit participation of Chinese photographers in the democracy movement. From the very first days of the crackdown, the Chinese government announced that it would use the photographic and television images collected by the West to identify and then interrogate the protesters. From the beginning of the events, all Western TV satellite dailies were carefully recorded and decrypted, as were the tapes of surveillance cameras installed in Tiananmen Square and at the entrances of Western hotels. Not publishing these documents would unfortunately not mean protecting those recognizable in the images. On the contrary, it would simply be giving in to blackmail and ultimately betraying the will of the Chinese photographers who, at great risk, managed to bear witness to an important period in their history. They have asked us to show them, to disseminate them, to circulate them so that the truth is told and never forgotten.
From the book's introduction.