Patrick Zachmann, on assignment at a jazz festival in Istanbul, accidentally found himself caught up in the chaos that night. During the concert, people began to leave and Zachmann’s assistant, a Turkish photographer, looked at his cell phone and learned that the roads in Istanbul were blocked with tanks. “It was completely surreal. More and more people left; it was intense. Nobody knew what was going on,” Zachmann says. After the festival, Zachmann and his assistant rushed back to the hotel and then to the assistant’s house, which was near Taksim Square. “It was really an atmosphere of war,” he says, describing the sound of shootings coming from Taksim Square and war planes overhead. “There was confusion; people running and screaming.”

Zachmann’s background is not as a news photographer—but he knew that being in Istanbul that night was important. “I had the feeling that something historic was happening.”

He says his strongest photo is of the “soldier looking at me, almost in fear.” It reminds him of a famous photograph of the Chile coup in 1973 by David Burnett. “It was the same fear, but here it was the soldiers who were afraid rather than the civilians and the activists in Chile.”