“I have seen some of Güler’s photographs so often that I confuse them with my own memories of Istanbul,” wrote Orhan Pamuk, Nobel laureate and one of Turkey’s most famous writers. The photos that fellow townsman Ara Güler had made of the people, the streets, the squares, the boats and the harbors in the 1950s and 1960s had settled in his memory as if he had actually been there himself. On the Galata Bridge, so majestically situated over the Golden Horn, where one day in 1952 it is teeming with pedestrians, trams and cars. With those fishermen in their wooden boats in the harbor in Karaköy. With the three old men who discuss the world on wooden stools on the sidewalk in Beyoğlu.
The iconic photos can be seen in the first room of the large overview exhibition Ara Güler – A Play of Light and Shadow in the Amsterdam photo museum Foam. They show a nostalgic image of Istanbul in black and white. Smoke billows from the smokestacks of the steamships moored along Galata Bridge, the skyline of mosques and minarets in the background. Threatening cloudy skies, silhouettes that stand out sharply against the sky, dramatic shadows and strikingly theatrical compositions – which is not surprising when you know that Güler experimented with film as a young man and trained in theatre.
Kismet
See more photos by Ara Güler in: Istanbul was Ara Güler’s muse
Ara Güler was born in 1928 in Istanbul and started as a photographer for the Turkish newspaper Yen Istanbul. His big break came when he was hired as a Near East correspondent in 1958 TimeLife in Turkey, and a few years later he also started working for European clients such as Stern, Paris Match and the Sunday Times. Through his contacts with photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson and Marc Riboud, he became a member of the Magnum photo agency for a short time, but decided to go his own way. In 2018, just before his death, the Ara Güler Museum opened in Istanbul, which also houses his archive of some 800,000 photographs.
Güler’s work has now been brought to Amsterdam in the context of Kismet, a multi-year program that gives Turkish photography a stage in the Netherlands at Foam. In addition to the iconic cityscapes, the exhibition pays particular attention to Güler’s lesser-known work. The portraits of western celebrities such as Alfred Hitchcock, Brigitte Bardot, Ansel Adams and James Baldwin. The photos of archaeological sites in Turkey. Reports about the first generation of Turkish guest workers in Germany, a Palestinian training camp in Jordan, female soldiers in Eritrea. Although Güler always very firmly claimed not to be an artist – he preferred to emphasize the documentary and journalistic aspects of his work – Foam shows that Güler did experiment with his photography. In the last rooms we see abstract images in which he plays with light and colour, surrealistic landscapes in which chess pieces stand in the sand like towers, collages, natural forms – cabbage leaves, branches, tree stumps – photographed so close that only form remains.
World class
Read also: Ara Güler was the chronicler of ancient Istanbul
A Play of Light and Shadow shows that Güler was a world-class photographer – yet he was nowhere near as well known as Western contemporaries. While its lights on the nightly Galata Bridge in the glittering rain can compete with the night scenes of Brassaï (which was called ‘the Eye of Paris’ – Güler was ‘the Eye of Istanbul’) and the men with white horses are reminiscent of the Roma series by Jozef Koudelka.
The exhibition thus fits in with the trend in which museums have been creating more and more space in recent decades for telling an alternative art history, which until recently was mainly determined by Western (and mainly male) makers. Or photographers from other countries who settled in the west: the Turkish Yousuf Karsh who left for Canada at a young age, the Hungarian André Kertész who was naturalized as an American in 1944. One wonders if Güler wouldn’t have become much more famous if he too had settled in Paris or America, and not stayed in Istanbul – a question that lingers in your mind.