Mesut Hancer sat alone, in the icy cold, atop the crumbling pile of stones that made up his home days ago, oblivious to the world and overwhelmed with grief.
The daughter, Irmak, was dead. But Hesut refused to let her go and stroked the fingers peeking out of a mattress where the girl was sleeping when the first earthquake hit early Monday.
There were no rescue teams and the survivors frantically struggled through the rubble to find relatives, neighbors and friends among the pieces of their homes in a street full of rubble.
Bed bases, clothes and torn toys told stories of lost lives. It was too late for Irmak – she was one of nearly 20,000 people killed in the worst earthquake to hit Turkey and Syria in nearly a century.
Adem Altan, an experienced AFP photographer who had traveled to the crime scene from Ankara, couldn’t take his eyes off the still-grieving father and aimed his camera at Hancer, 60 meters away. It was a delicate moment. But instead of pushing Altan away, that father called out to him in pain. “Take pictures of my daughter,” he said in a low, trembling voice.
The father wanted the world to see his pain – and that of the entire nation. And it happened.
The AFP photo has appeared on the front pages of the world’s leading newspapers, including the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal. “While I was taking the pictures I was very sad. I kept repeating to myself, ‘What an immense pain.’ I couldn’t stop crying,” Altan recalls. “I am wordless.”
Altan asked Hancer his name and then his daughter’s name. “He spoke slowly, so I couldn’t talk to him much,” says the photographer, adding that he couldn’t ask many questions because everyone had to respect the silence to try to hear the survivors under the rubble.
Altan has been a photographer for 40 years, 15 of them with the AFP, and he knew that photography represented Turkey’s pain. But the overall impact surprised him. The image has since been shared online hundreds of thousands of times, and Altan has received thousands of messages from people around the world wanting to offer support.
“Many have told me they will never forget this image.”
Source: DN
