There are images that defy chronology. They belong not to a specific year, but to a recurrence. On the morning of June 5, 1989—one day after the People's Liberation Army had cleared Tiananmen Square using tanks and live ammunition—a man in a white shirt and dark trousers stepped out onto the broad Chang'an Avenue to confront a column of Type 59 battle tanks. In each hand, he carried a shopping bag, as if he were simply on his way home from the market. He positioned himself directly in front of the lead tank; the tank swerved to the left; he stepped back into its path; the tank veered to the right; and once again, the man blocked its way. Then he climbed up onto the vehicle, spoke with the crew, and climbed back down. Finally, several bystanders hurriedly pulled him away. To this day, no one knows with certainty who he was or whether he survived. History has swallowed him whole, yet retained his image.
Thirty-six years, seven months, and twenty-four days later—on December 29, 2025—a young man sat cross-legged on the asphalt of Jomhuri Avenue in central Tehran, not far from a mobile phone shopping center. Advancing before him was a line of security forces and Basij militiamen on motorcycles; behind him surged a crowd that had been taking to the streets for days to protest the collapse of the rial, rampant inflation, and the despair of an impoverished nation. He did not move. Unlike the man in Beijing, however, he pulled his jacket up over his head, concealing his face. Within hours, the international press christened him with a name that had already been claimed: "Tehran's Tank Man." The echo was so precise that it stung. It is as if history had repeated a verse—one whose rhyme we have long known, yet whose meaning still eludes us.
The Image That Outlives the Man
In her essays on photography, Susan Sontag coined the beautiful yet disquieting phrase that to photograph is to bestow significance upon the subject. The image ennobles the event it captures, while simultaneously outliving it. Several shots exist of the man on Chang'an Avenue—taken from the windows and balconies of the Beijing Hotel by Jeff Widener for the Associated Press, by Stuart Franklin for Magnum, by Charlie Cole, and by Arthur Tsang. It was not until twenty years later that Terril Jones published a shot taken from ground level—from amidst the throng of fleeing passersby—having long hesitated to do so out of respect for the iconic images that had preceded it. It is, therefore, a paradoxical genealogy: the nameless man was rendered immortal through the lens, yet remained nameless through that very same lens. The photograph transformed him into a symbol while erasing him as a person.
Herein lies the peculiar cruelty of the icon: it requires the individual, yet consumes him. What remains is a silhouette—an outline that can be filled with any content imaginable: with hope, with sorrow, or with political appropriation. In 1998, *Time Magazine* named the "Unknown Rebel" one of the one hundred most influential people of the century—a man without a name, without a face in the sense of a police dossier, and with an uncertain fate. Sontag understood that the photographic image is a form of appropriation—a silent act of taking possession of reality. To photograph, she writes, is to transform lived experience into a souvenir, and oneself into a spectator. The "Tank Man" belongs to us all precisely because he belongs to no one. He has become a currency that holds its value through every crisis.
Yet, in later years, Sontag would intensify her own skepticism regarding the image. In her late book on the suffering of others, she asked whether the ceaseless circulation of images of horror might not, in fact, desensitize us rather than spur us to action. The compassion that a photograph evokes is a fleeting emotion; it dissipates if not followed by action, and it can transform into that comforting certainty of being powerless—and therefore innocent. It is this skepticism that accompanies our encounter with the "Tank Man" today. We recognize the image, and in that act of recognition, the shock threatens to fade away.
Anonymity as Protection and as Weakness
And yet, a crucial trait distinguishes these two scenes—one that reveals more about our present than it does about their heroes. The man in Beijing presented his face openly to the cameras; he acted in a world where images still had to travel—on reels of film, smuggled across borders in diplomatic pouches—before reaching the powerful and the public. The man in Tehran, however, concealed himself. He knew that every lens could simultaneously serve as an eye of the state—that facial recognition and biometric databases could distill a fleeting moment into a lifelong sentence. The jacket pulled over his head is the garment of our era: at once a shield and a confession, an act of self-erasure at the very moment of greatest visibility.
Herein lies a bitter dialectic. The anonymity that ensures sheer survival in a surveillance state simultaneously deprives the gesture itself of the martyr it demands. A movement requires names, faces, and biographies—figures around whom grief and solidarity can coalesce. Consider the young Mahsa Amini, whose death in police custody in the autumn of 2022 ignited an entire uprising precisely because she possessed a name, an age, and a face. The old dictatorships created their martyrs involuntarily, by killing individuals whose names were known and whose memories could be cherished. The new dictatorships, however, erase faces before the regime even strikes. Those who conceal themselves seek protection—yet simultaneously hand the apparatus precisely what it most desires: silence regarding identity, and the dissolution of the individual into the mere statistics of the detained. Concealment is, in one and the same act, both self-defense and defeat.
The Action of the Individual
In her magnum opus on human activities, Hannah Arendt distinguished "action" from "making" and from mere "labor." Action—such was her profound insight—is the only activity that occurs directly *between* human beings, without the detour through things or matter. It is the act of *beginning*—that capacity to introduce something new into the world, something that does not follow inevitably from any prior history and that no one can predict. Arendt termed this capacity—employing a concept rooted in theology—*natality*: every human being is a beginning because he was born, and can therefore himself become a beginning. The man who steps out of the crowd and stands alone before a steel machine performs precisely this improbable act. He begins something whose outcome no one knows—least of all himself.
For Arendt, action is realized only within the *space of appearance*—the public realm in which human beings see one another and are seen, where the many come together as distinct individuals. She called this *plurality*: the fact that it is not *Man*, but *men* who inhabit the earth—each unique, and none replaceable. In this moment of stepping forth, who a person *is* is revealed—not *what* he is (his attributes, his profession, his origins), but the unmistakable *who* of his person. Herein lies the full tragedy of that veiled gesture in Tehran. The man acts; he steps into the space of appearance—and yet he withholds the appearance of his face. He seeks to act without paying the price of being recognized. In this tension, Arendt would have discerned the full plight of the present age: a public realm that has become a trap; an act of stepping forth that must simultaneously serve as a hiding place. And yet, the miracle of which she spoke still occurs—the beginning that is set in motion against all odds, simply because a single individual decides that the world, as it currently stands, cannot be allowed to continue.
The Power of the Powerless
But why does an apparatus that commands tanks and motorcycles, prisons and courts, fear a single man sitting alone? Václav Havel provided the answer in his essay *The Power of the Powerless*—long before images from Beijing and Tehran served to illustrate it. Havel’s famous parable centers on the greengrocer who hangs a slogan in his shop window—one he does not believe in—simply because everyone else does, and because refusing to participate would be far more dangerous than engaging in the ritualistic charade. The poster asserts a conviction that the shopkeeper does not hold; it is a sign of submission, disguised as a declaration of belief. The system sustains itself not through genuine conviction, but through complicity—through that daily, petty betrayal of one’s own truth, which Havel termed "living within a lie." Yet, the moment the shopkeeper removes the sign and resolves to "live in truth," he tears through this fabric of lies, exposing it for exactly what it is.
The man standing before the tank is the greengrocer writ large. He has ceased to play along; his refusal is so profoundly threatening precisely because it is public, visible, and contagious. It demonstrates to others that "playing along" was a choice—not an immutable force of nature—and that the wall of obedience encircling the regime is, in fact, constructed entirely of individual decisions. Nobel Peace Laureate Liu Xiaobo—himself a product of the 1989 movement—described the mindset of China’s rulers with piercing clarity: ever since that time, he observed, they have existed in a state of paranoia, perceiving a fundamental threat in even the most harmless and peaceable of groups. This paranoia is no delusion, but rather an entirely accurate perception of their own vulnerability; for no army in the world is truly impervious to the sheer power of a single individual’s example. For the power of the powerless lies not in weapons, but in the simple demonstration that a different way of behaving is possible. That is why Tank Man vanished so tracelessly; that is why the man in Tehran was beaten and dragged away. Not because they destroyed anything, but because they revealed something that could no longer be taken back once it had been seen.
The Revenant
The question remains: what does it mean when a gesture returns? One might interpret it as a source of solace: as long as people continue to place themselves in front of tanks and motorcycles, courage has not died out, and the silent language of dignity is understood across borders and across decades. The man in Tehran quoted the man in Beijing without ever having seen him—much as one poetic verse rhymes with another. Within this rhyme lies a promise: that the image of the one lent the other the very form through which his act of defiance became legible in the first place. The icon—ambivalent as it may be—establishes a grammar of resistance that requires no translation.
Yet this recurrence has a darker side. The fact that this gesture remains necessary thirty-seven years later stands as an indictment. It signifies that the world the man of 1989 sought to change has, in crucial respects, remained unchanged. It signifies that the machines people place themselves in front of today have merely changed their form—from tank treads to motorcycle squadrons, from smuggled film reels to all-seeing facial recognition systems. And it exacts a price—one that seems to rise with every repetition. The man who filmed the Tehran video—videographer Masoud Payahoo—was sentenced this past May to ten years in prison for allegedly collaborating with Israel; his lawyer maintains that he merely shared the footage with a few friends, with no intention of it ever becoming public. The witness pays for what he saw—almost as dearly as the one he witnessed.
Sontag wrote that the photographed world does not necessarily teach us compassion in the end, but sometimes, rather, desensitization. Perhaps this is the true danger of the revenant: that we already know the image, and it therefore strikes us with less force; that we recognize the icon, and in the act of recognition, unlearn how to be shocked. Against this desensitization, only one thing helps: to remember that behind every silhouette stands a human being with a name we do not know, and with a destiny we will never learn. The man from Chang'an Avenue vanished; the man from Jomhuri Avenue was dragged away. What remains is their beginning—the miracle of the improbable new start, which Arendt called the very essence of all action. And the quiet, tenacious hope that, someday, a human being will step in front of a machine—a person whose gesture no one will ever need to quote again, because it will have been the last of its kind.
Sapere aude!
S.
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