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Buy/gift a digital subscription Login to the Digital EditionKnown as the ‘Turkish Henri Cartier-Bresson’, Ara Güler roamed the streets, creating gritty portraits of everyday life. Now an exhibition, ‘Istanbul Awakens’, at Bomonti’s Ara Güler Museum, brings together some of his most poignant masterpieces, alongside unseen archive images and classics from the darkroom, to reveal the real Istanbul beneath the modern city
Ara Güler was a man of few words, as Geordie Greig, now editor of the online London newspaper The Independent, discovered when he interviewed him for Cornucopia in 1990. Greig, already a seasoned journalist, had made the notorious Kray twins talk, but Ara stumped him. He shrugged off his famous portraits of Picasso, Callas, Jackie Onassis, Churchill, Dali, with hardly a word. They were who they were. But Istanbul was different, and Ara relaxed: “Photography is a way of looking at the outside world, an art born of man’s loneliness… Man is a lonely creature, even in a crowd…” That idea lies at the heart of Istanbul Awakens, the most poetic to date in a series of spellbinding exhibitions staged by the Ara Güler Museum. The show traces a day in the life of the city, lingering lovingly on its twilight zones. It was inspired by a story Ara wrote when he was 18 which he preserved, like many of his writings, carefully typed, in a leather-bound notebook.
Ara died in 2018 at the age of 90, having entrusted his life’s work to Doğuş, the Turkish conglomerate. A dedicated team would care first for him, then for his legacy. They continue to unearth magical images, such as the dancing sailor above and the fishermen on the Galata Bridge opposite, and are now cataloguing his library of 13,000 books in at least 18 languages.
When Ara died in 2018 at the age of 90, his legacy was already secure: he had entrusted his life’s work to the Turkish corporation Doğuş, on the condition that they would care first for him, and then for his archive. His generosity proved infectious, and Doğuş have done him proud. A dedicated team continues to unearth unseen images, such as the dancing sailor above, and are currently cataloguing a library of 2,000 books in 12 languages.
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