Tiananmen Square Still Haunts Photographer Brothers After 25 Years
Two well-known photojournalists, identical twins, were witness to the hopeful protest and its violent aftermath
David Turnley was in Paris when he got the call. His brother Peter was in Beijing to cover the visit of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to China but was on the line with different, more exciting news. A small group of students had taken to the streets in protest in Tiananmen Square—and their numbers were swelling.
"I think something is happening here," Peter told his brother. You need to cover this too, Peter urged.
What had started with a handful of students "soon turned into 10,000, and a few days after that, a million," recalls Peter, all in support of greater political and personal freedoms. The year 1989 was a time of historic change in entrenched political systems like the Soviet Union
