Dad never failed to arrange photographs he felt were important along the frame of the mirror in the living room. As my cousins grew there were more and more pictures. At first there were more pictures of me that lined the edge of the mirror but soon those were replaced by pictures of my cousins’ weddings and their newborn babies. Whenever dad came to Istanbul and needed to buy anything he would immediately hand me his wallet and say, “son, there’s a card in here and the password is written on a slip of paper beside it. Take out as much as we need.” Unable to tell him that I had more money than everything he had in his modest pensioner’s account, I would quietly take his wallet. While I pretended to locate his card and its password, I would have a good look around. Next to his ID card are five or six business cards he must have felt were the important ones, a newspaper clipping “A Cure for Parkinson’s is Discovered,” a picture of me and my moustache when I was registering as a student in the Politics Department, and tucked away inside is a little portrait of my niece who died when she was very young …

That’s how it is. Some photographs hit you right in the heart and the same way every time.

Here is what a photographer friend of mine who was lucky enough to make it out of the fire in Sivas said about what happened:

“I say to myself I am going to die. There’s no way out of here. The people out there are going to burn us alive. So at least I should try to save the photos I took in the hotel. I pulled out the film and slipped it into an envelope. I put that in my wallet and then pressed that against my body. I was thinking that when they found my body they would definitely find those photographs …”

And so we have those burnt, pungent photos of brothers Metin and Behçet sitting in desperation on the stairs of the Madımak Hotel. Photographs that were pressed closely to the body of my friend.

*

Photographs can sometimes bring unexpected surprises. Open up doors you never would have thought of. My wife was acting in a film when she recommended me to the director for a minor role. He said, “what’s he look like?” and she showed him the picture of me she always kept in her wallet. Maybe my adventure as a cinema actor began the moment he said those words, “ok then, let’s go with him.”

The story of Naile is another story altogether. One evening Naile was killed by two people whose photographs she carried in her purse. Naile was 16 when she was raped but no one in her family knew about her pregnancy. When she went to hospital with an unrelated complaint her condition became apparent. Doctors surmised what had happened to her and they detained her. A prosecutor was apprised of the situation. Naile’s father then promised the prosecutor they would come for Naile and her baby four days after the birth. Indeed they came and fetched her from the hospital but that same night Naile’s older brother told her he was going to take her out for a walk and they left the house together. Her mother encouraged her to go. And right there in the middle of the street her brother shot her dead. In her purse she always carried the photographs of her father and her brother: photographs of the people who had killed her. Naile’s blood was on them.