Adem Altan, a photographer for forty years, who spent fifteen of them at Agence France-Presse, was working in front of a collapsed building when he saw a man sitting near the rubble in Kahramanmaraş, the epicenter of the earthquake that killed more than 14,000 people in Turkey alone.
No rescue team had arrived at the site on Tuesday, the day following the disaster, and residents were trying to clear the rubble themselves to save their loved ones.
The man in the orange jacket remained motionless in the commotion, indifferent to the rain and hail.
It was then that Adem Altan noticed that a man 60 meters away from him was holding an outstretched hand from among the rubble.
At that time, he began filming the scene: a father holding the hand of his dead child without letting go, amid the rubble and destruction.
Altan took the pictures while the man watched him, who whispered to him in a trembling voice, “Take pictures of my baby.”
Journalist Piers Morgan wrote that the photo was “heart-breaking”.
He left her hand, which he did not want to let go for a moment, to show the photographer the place where his 15-year-old daughter lay, before rushing to grab her once more.
“I was so touched at that time. I had tears in my eyes. I kept saying to myself: Oh my God, this is unbearable pain,” says Adam Altan.
Then the photographer asked the man his name and the name of his daughter, and the father, Massoud Hanser, replied, “My daughter, Irmak.”
Others reacted to the story.
“He spoke with difficulty, in a very low voice. It was difficult to ask him more questions as the residents around him told people to remain silent so that they might hear the voices of potential survivors trapped under the rubble,” says the photographer.
At that moment, the photographer immediately thought that the photo summed up the pain of the earthquake victims, but he might not imagine the impact it would have.
The image spread in the media around the world as well as on social networks, where it was shared by hundreds of thousands of users shocked by the effects of the earthquake.
Adem Altan has received thousands of letters from around the world expressing solidarity with the grieving father.
“I think it is an image that will remain in my memory,” he says. “Many people have told me they will never forget this image, including me.”