How did you come to be in the park on the day in question?

When the Gezi protests began, I was working for one of the biggest newspapers in Turkey as a staff photographer. I was usually pretty free to do the jobs I wanted to, but the newspaper – like most Turkish media at that time – refused to send me to Gezi to document what was going on.

That opened my eyes to many things and it was in general a defining moment for the press in Turkey. Many in the mainstream media did not relay information, or they did so in a biased and partisan way. Even worse, as police brutality in Istanbul spiralled out of control on one night, CNN Turkey chose to air a documentary on penguins…

I decided to cover the events anyway, to follow and document everything for myself to keep as historical evidence, even though I was sure it would not be published by my employers.

From the first day, in order to follow the events as closely as possible, I pitched my tent in the middle of the park, just as the demonstrators did. It was not a militant act, I was doing my job as a photojournalist. I covered the events from the side of the demonstrators as well as the police. It was important to me to show that the police were fatigued and under extreme pressure, and that there was disagreement among them over the way demonstrators were being treated. I spent my days with a mask on, drowned in a cloud of tear gas. I didn’t fall asleep until my strength abandoned me.

One month after the events, having seen that the newspaper for which I was working had not published anything about these demonstrations, I decided to resign and start my freelance career by founding my own photographic agency.