A professional photo-reporter working freelance for major international news agencies, his life changed dramatically when he was badly wounded in 1983 during the ASALA attack on the Turkish Airlines counter at the Orly airport outside of Paris.
Back in Istanbul after that, he worked freelance for the Turkish press as well international news agencies, and his busy schedule required frequent traveling.
His first photography project, even before he could return to professional life, was a photo essay he made in 1984 on burned patients in the very same hospital in Paris where he was treated for his wounds.
His career changed scope and direction, as he moved from current news to a different kind of photo-reporting: he photographed an extensive selection of old manuscripts found in the Topkapı Museum Library in Istanbul.
He asked Doğan Kuban, the renowned professor of architectural history, to be the co-editor in charge of the essays, while he himself was the book's project manager as well as the author of the photographs, some of them of stunning artistic beauty.
His younger sister İlgün died on March 3, 1974, whilst a passenger on Turkish Airlines Flight 981 that crashed near Ermenonville in France, shortly after leaving Paris.