The Feb. 6 earthquake, with a magnitude of at least Mww 7.8, has destroyed thousands of buildings in southern and central Turkey, as well as locations across the border in Syria. Many of the more than 20,000 dead were killed in those collapsing buildings.
Yet even as we try to tally to the toll of the disaster, each victim is a tragedy all on its own. And from far away, photographs help remind us of this truth.
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A father’s grief
Adem Altan, a veteran Ankara-based photographer working for the French news agency AFP, rushed to Kahramanmaraş, a city near the epicenter of the earthquake. There, he encountered a man, Mesut Hancer, sitting on a pile of broken bricks that were once his home.
Hancer called out to the photographer: “Take pictures of my child.” The father was holding the hand of his 15-year-old daughter, Irmak, whose body was still lying on the mattress she fell asleep on when the earthquake hit and her home collapsed.
Altan captured the grief of a father, and of a nation. “I couldn’t stop myself from crying,” the AFP photographer said.
