A father's pain

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Adem Atlan is a Turkish photojournalist known for his work covering significant events and news stories. His photography often captures powerful and poignant moments.

A photographer for 40 years, including 15 with afp, Adem Atlan was working in front of a destroyed building in kahramanmaras, at the epicenter of the earthquake that killed more than fourteen thousand people in Turkey, when he saw a man sitting in the rubble and immortalise a scene of rare pain on Tuesday, February 7, 2023.

The worst thing was that no rescue team had arrived on site by Tuesday, the day after the disaster, so the inhabitants were trying to remove the ruins themselves to save their loved ones.

However, the man in the orange jacket named Mesut Hancer remained motionless in the middle of the rubble, unaffected by the rain and cold. Adem Atlan then realized that the man was holding a hand in his, that of his 15-year-old daughter Irmak, killed by the earthquake, lifeless with her father who had not left his hand once for 24 hours. When the photographer immortalized this horrible scene, the father asked adem to take his daughter. The photographer then declared "I was so touched at that moment. I had tears in my eyes. I kept saying to myself "My God, this is unbearable pain".

After the photo went viral, Adem Atlan received thousands of messages from Internet users expressing their solidarity and emotion at the father's grief. Indeed, the image was all over the social networks, creating a craze around it. For the media, it's one of the most striking photos ever taken.

Personally, I chose this image to appear in Time Magazine because I think it exudes enormous power. Looking at it, you can't but place yourself in the father's position and feel the atrocity of the situation. He's in so much pain that he can't move, staring into space for hours on end. It's as if his daughter is physically dead and he's dead inside. It's blood-curdling

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