Hay Festival 2016: Tiananmen Square photographer Stuart Franklin on seven of his favourite pictures

I began photographing professionally in the early Eighties, when there was an appetite for lengthy photo-essays. When I photographed the Moss Side housing estate in Salford, I had been commissioned to look at unemployment and the collapse of manufacturing, especially shipbuilding. The picture expresses Henri Cartier-Bresson’s notion of the “decisive moment”: I took two or three rolls of film of this scene, knowing that there tends to be only one picture in which all the compositional elements come together.

The living conditions in the Moss Side flats I visited were appalling; the families seemed isolated from each other. The favelas or barrios I visited in Latin America, what was then called the Third World, at least seemed to offer a supportive community. In Mexico City, where I was sent on assignment for the Telegraph Magazine, I worked again in black and white. I tend to walk a lot when photographing, looking for people, places and stories. In Barrio Santa Fe, I was surprised by the contrast between the shanty town and the smartly turned out schoolchildren. I returned there over several years, documenting the community as they worked together to build streets, drains and eventually gardens.

In 1989, the photographic agency Magnum sent me to China to cover the Tiananmen Square demonstrations. After martial law was declared on May 30, the army arrived. Truckloads of soldiers patrolled the streets, then armoured personnel carriers and tanks arrived. The massacre that occurred overnight on June 3-4 took place, for the most part, on the outskirts of the city, although we had expected it in Tiananmen Square. Of those killed in the square, about 20 were shot in broad daylight the morning after the crackdown, in full view, several hundred metres up the avenue from the Beijing Hotel, where about 50 journalists were staying.

A row of tanks then rumbled out of the square and up Chang An Avenue, cleared of demonstrators. Unexpectedly, the tanks’ path was blocked, outside the Beijing Hotel, by a man dressed in a white shirt and dark trousers, carrying two shopping bag. Once the incident had been broadcast by CNN and syndicated by others (CNN’s cameraman was the only one with a tripod), the man in front of the tank came to symbolise the revolt more powerfully than the pictures of bloodshed and crushed bicycles.

Two years later, I began a 15-year stint with National Geographic. The director of photography had seen a photo-essay I’d made of Lloyd’s, the insurance brokers. “If you can make an office building look that interesting,” he said, “let’s see how you manage in Peru.” I was there at the time of civil insurgency, when more than half the rural population was working in feudal farming, the rest in Dickensian mining towns. The agricultural engineers trying to improve productivity were a prime target for the rebels. The man in my photograph was carrying potatoes down a hill in Cajamarca when I stopped him to ask if I could take his picture.

My Spanish improved in Latin America, but in Brazil I had to start again, in Portuguese. I was assigned to cover megacities, cities with a population of more than 10 million. One was São Paulo. It’s a hot, tough city and I’d previously concentrated on its bleaker side. Changing tack, I waited for hours for something meaningful to happen under a shower that cascaded into one of the city’s swimming pools. Eventually it came together: a couple cavorted in front of me, framed by the brutalist architecture for which Brazil is famous.

I also tried to represent Africa in a way that was different from the images of violence and disease that had been filling magazine pages since the Sixties. The picture here was taken in a car park in Accra, Ghana, for my book Hotel Afrique. On his first day, an employee is being shown how to knot a tie.

 Stuart Franklin will be speaking about his book The Documentary Impulse on June 1; hayfestival.org

To order The Documentary Impulse by Stuart Franklin (Phaidon, £19.95) from the Telegraph for £16.95 plus £1.99 p&p, call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk