Some of us might have shared this photograph on our social media websites – the image of a girl mistaking a photographer’s lens for a gun and raising her hands in fear and surrender. But what is the story behind this photograph and who captured this sad moment?
According to BBC.com, the original photographer is Turkish - Osman Sağırlı but it was a photojournalist based in Gaza who tweeted the photograph first and made it go viral.Her original post was retweeted 11,000 times. Once the image was shared on Reddit, it was upvoted 5000 times and had more than 1600 comments.
This also led to accusations of the photograph being doctored and fake. On the Imgur, an image sharing website, one user tracked the original image and the photographer, Osman Sağırlı, as the man who took the picture. It showed the clipping of the original Turkish newspaper, which read:
His face tightens immediately. He bites his lower lip and slowly raises his hands. He stands still without a word. It isn’t easy to console the child who thinks that the camera looking at him is a gun.
His name is Hudea… He is only 4 years old. He lost his dad in the bombing of Hama. He took refuge at the Atme camp at the Turkish border with his mom and three siblings.
Sağırlı - now working in Tanzania - to confirm the origins of the picture. The child is in fact not a boy, but a four-year-old girl, Hudea. The image was taken at the Atmeh refugee camp in Syria, in December last year. She travelled to the camp - around 10 km from the Turkish border - with her mother and two siblings. It is some 150 km from their home in Hama.
"I was using a telephoto lens, and she thought it was a weapon," says Sağırlı. "İ realised she was terrified after I took it, and looked at the picture, because she bit her lips and raised her hands. Normally kids run away, hide their faces or smile when they see a camera." He says he finds pictures of children in the camps particularly revealing. "You know there are displaced people in the camps. It makes more sense to see what they have suffered not through adults, but through children. It is the children who reflect the feelings with their innocence."
The image was first published in the Türkiye newspaper in January, where Sağırlı has worked for 25 years, covering war and natural disasters outside the country
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