The most famous photo of the Tiananmen Square protests, that of an unidentified man facing down Chinese tanks, was taken by Jeff Widener of The Associated Press. Widener, now with The Honolulu Advertiser, recalls how he got the picture:

To this day, it's the only photograph hanging on my wall.

I still see it as the shot I almost blew. I had miscalculated the shutter speed. Of the three images I took, only one came out — it was kind of blurry, but apparently clear enough to be used in more than 6,000 publications around the world the next day.

The story of how I got the photo centers on two people whose names I never knew.

The Chinese government's crackdown on Tiananmen Square had been going on for several days, and the government was trying to prevent any more Western media from documenting all the street battles and deaths.

I wanted to get into the Beijing Hotel, which offered a high vantage point from which I could take photos. That wasn't going to be easy. The Chinese had put security guys in white suits there to guard against journalists. The rumor was they were using cattle prods to repel unwanted visitors.

So I hid my camera inside my Levis jacket, and stuffed my film in my underwear. Then I walked through the hotel's front door, and the guards approached me. I saw this long-haired college kid who was registered at the hotel, and I exclaimed, "Hi, Joe! I've been looking for you!" Then I whispered, "I'm from the AP. Can you show me up to your room?"

The kid picked it up immediately. We went up to his room, and then to the roof.

Several hours passed. My head was still aching from a concussion I'd suffered a few days before, when a rock thrown by a protester hit me in the face. When I saw the guy standing in front of the tanks — the subject of the now-famous picture — I thought: They're going to shoot this guy. Why are they waiting?

After I was done, I asked the kid to smuggle the film to the AP office at the diplomatic compound. He did. I think his name was Kurt, but I'm sorry to say I don't know for sure. It would be great to find him and thank him.

I was back in China recently. Frankly, I was shocked the Chinese government let me in. There are so many new office buildings, and seemingly a Starbucks on every corner. But it was hard not to see everything through the prism of what happened 20 years ago, the China of 1989 I captured in that picture.

The other name I don't know, of course, is the guy in the picture. Nobody knows who he was, or what happened to him, but I think in some ways it's better that way. I still think of him as the unknown soldier — the faceless guy who represents all of us.