“A final embrace,” the photograph that won a World Press Photo award and was selected as one of Time magazine’s top 10 photos of 2013, is one of the most recognised pictures that represent the haunting tragedy of the disaster.
Taslima Akhter, the photographer who snapped the image, recalled how she felt when taking the picture, telling the Dhaka Tribune: “Whenever I look back at this photo, I feel uncomfortable, and that is what I want to be.”
Describing the harrowing hours of the fateful day, she said: “April 24 [of 2013] was the shortest day of my life, as I cannot recall how the day passed. At midnight, all of us were in a state that cannot be explained. I saw the startled eyes of the relatives. Some were crying. Some were looking for their family members.”
When asked about how she had found the embracing workers inside the rubble, Taslima said: “Around 2am on April 25, some of my friends who are activists came and told me that there were many dead bodies near the back of the collapsed building. I went with them and found many scattered bodies, some of them in horrible conditions, which continue to haunt me. The place was completely dark, so we turned on our flashlights and found the couple at the back of the building, embracing each other in the rubble.
“I just took a few snaps and noticed a drop of blood running from the man’s eye like a tear. I stopped taking snaps and just left the place without saying anything. You cannot really feel the situation; 1,136 lives is not a matter of joke. This drop of blood that ran like a tear describes the situation of our workers who do not know when they might have to die for the factory owner’s criminal negligence. My photography is my protest,” Taslima said.
“Believe me; I was not ready to take a photo at the time, because for the whole day we had only seen hundreds of bodies of the workers with whom I had been working since 2008. However, after taking the photo, I kept thinking about them for the whole night. In that place, I saw bodies in the most horrible conditions inside the concrete. Who they were, I do not know,” she added.
Describing her feelings on winning an award for such a tragic situation, the acclaimed photographer said she hopes that her photo will haunt the audience and force them to think whether the dreams of the victims matters to them.
“With my photo I just want to provoke your thoughts,” said Taslima, who had also won the best photography award in the fifth Dali International Photography Exhibition in China in 2013.
Time magazine, which gave the photo its title: “a final embrace,” also termed the image as the “single most haunting photo” of the Rana Plaza disaster. Although the magazine had not consulted the person behind the lens for the title, Taslima said she agreed with Time’s decision, as the couple may have been trying to embrace just before their deaths.
“Whenever we face any type of accident, we feel like holding onto anything that comes in front of us,” she said.
Although she has tried for a long time, Taslima has not been able to learn the names of the two victims in her photo, nor was she able find out whether the couple had been lovers.
Many of the survivors told the photographer that when they were trapped inside the rubbles, they pulled other people’s hair or bit them in order to ease their own pain. Some tried to kill themselves by slamming their own heads in the rubble as they could not tolerate the suffering.
She said the photograph of the embrace was a witness to this suffering, adding that when the photo receives any award, she feels like she had shared the pain with a worldwide audience.
Taslima, whose website also features photos from four other garment factory fires that killed hundreds more, said: “My photographs are witnesses to the cruel history of workers being killed. The photographs always tell me that the deaths of workers are only a number to a state.”