The job of journalists and reporters is to cover events like the earthquake in the Syrian-Turkish border area. But sometimes they become part of the story themselves, like the photo reporter whose photo of a grieving father went around the world.
It is the image that went around the world of the earthquake disaster in Turkey and Syria: A father sits in front of a collapsed house in the southern Turkish city of Kahramanmara? and holds his dead daughter’s hand. The picture was taken by Adem Altan, who has been working as a photojournalist for more than 40 years.
According to him, the picture that was taken on Tuesday morning cannot be compared to any of the tens of thousands of photos he has taken over the course of his career. Altan is on site for the AFP news agency. From Ankara he set out for the earthquake area earlier this week.
He reached Kahramanmara? on Tuesday morning, Altan told the British Guardian. Families were digging for loved ones in the rubble of a collapsed apartment complex. The 7.8 magnitude tremor was just over 24 hours ago.
However, the photographer couldn’t take his eyes off a man sitting almost motionless among dust and concrete. “When I looked closer, I saw that he was holding a hand,” says the photographer, “so I started taking pictures.”
The whole world now knows the man’s name: Mesut Hançer. He is the father who won’t let go of the hand of his 15-year-old daughter Irmak, who was killed. Hançer saw Altan taking pictures and asked him to continue. “Take a picture of my child,” Hançer said and showed him his daughter.
“I saw a person’s head under the rubble. I ask him his name,” says the photographer. “Then I asked his child’s name. He was a little far away and I had trouble understanding him. He said his daughter’s name was Irmak.”
Altan took numerous photos that morning of the grieving father and his dead daughter. The work was very difficult for him. “My eyes were full of tears and I had a hard time not crying while I was taking photos. After taking the photos, I waited a while longer, expecting someone to come and take the girl away. Unfortunately, no one came. “
A day later he returned to the collapsed residential complex, but Hançer was no longer there. And the girl’s body was gone too.
Since then, Altan has received hundreds of messages about the photo, which has also spread through social media. Someone wrote to him that it was a photo “that we will never forget until we die”. For him, the picture shows the “physical and emotional devastation caused by the earthquake, it documents a father’s immeasurable love for his daughter and it asks the question: ‘Is there any greater pain than this?'”
