For roughly 30 years you have made a name for yourself around the world bearing, as you put it, ‘direct witness’ to social developments in Turkey and nearly all the wars that have been fought in that time. What you do is in a sense to record history... Civilization is something erected on the past. The lessons gained from experience make life better and more comfortable for those who come after. And these lessons are drawn sometimes from the wars that humans fight with each other, sometimes from warnings given to humanity by nature. Of course for all of this some kind of documentation is needed. And it is scientists, scholars and people like us who bear these documents. We witness history and, by clicking the shutter, stop time; we show the pertinent moment and thus make it possible for humankind to draw a lesson.

You’ve faced all sorts of danger on the front. How have you managed to protect yourself physically and emotionally? I had several close calls. Once in Afghanistan near the Panchir Valley the truck I was hanging onto the rear of struck a mine.