Copyright © 1989 Stuart Franklin / Magnum Photos
JOY

by Nicholas Momurray

The Chinese student uprising in 1989 gave the world one image that will live: the man with his shopping bags standing in the middle of a street in front of a line of stopped tanks. The picture spoke instantly and fully about the individual faced with tyranny, suggesting the existence of hope in a situation that by all appearances appears hopeless.

Another image, much less well-known, came out of Tiananmen Square, Stuart Franklin's remarkable photograph of a half-naked figure, arms stretched to the sky, both hands extended in a double V-for-victory gesture, eyes hardly open as if just awakening to a new, hoped-for but hardly expected day, the beginning of a smile not of disbelief but of belief. Supported by a friend, a classmate, a stranger, the figure seems the yin of pure celebration, delight, to the yang of that other figure somewhere nearby frozen in grainy black-and-white for all eternity to stand, shopping interrupted, in the path of the machines of war and repression.

The tank photo shouts courage and implies hope. The half-naked picture shouts joy and implies victory. The tank picture became instantly world-famous. The half-naked picture, which in its way is fully as powerful, was seen and then vanished. Why?

The answer is simple and infinitely complex: skin.

The West early celebrated skin. The Greeks left the bottom part of Europe littered with beautiful statues of naked people, which the Romans imitated weakly. A thousand years later in Florence and environs another culture's artists painted and sculpted the unclothed body with invention equal to that of the Greeks. Though we drift away from it, the invigoration of the nude tradition is part of the foundation of Western culture.

Go to the other end of Eurasia, to China, to another culture with old, old roots. Look for skin, and you find nothing. The human figure is there in art but always clothed, more often than not subsumed to and overwhelmed by the powerfully seductive eroticism of landscape. But skin? No.

Then in May of 1989, in the most public of Chinese spaces, a shirtless man not only displays himself, he stretches his body to the heavens in an attitude of unrestrained, welcoming joy, against a backdrop of blurred, clothed masses and unfurled flags of ideological red, with the massive clunkiness of tyranny's dull architecture lurking, lurking, lurking. Is the stormy sky advancing or retreating? Does it matter? From somewhere light falls on what Americans call a "farmer's tan," head, neck and hands brown, but the torso pale and rarely touched by the sun.

Underarm hair, nipples, a waist too narrow for ready-made belts. Could he in the next instant have removed the black pants? It wouldn't have mattered. The body reaches out of darkness toward light, supporting widening and delighted vision and smiling lips, just as his friend supports the body.

For the Chinese, with their anti-skin tradition, an image that borders on the shocking. For us, a reminder, an insistent admonition from a distant, strange place.

Not "them". Not "us". Just same old same old "we".

Up toward light, or down toward darkness. That is always the choice, the only choice.

END

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