In Paris he met Henri Cartier-Bresson who invited him to become the 16th member of the Magnum photographic agency, which then began to distribute his work to more magazines and newspapers globally.Īlthough he later left Magnum, he retained strong links with and friendships at the co-operative. This raised his profile internationally, and before long he found himself also working for European titles, particularly Stern, Paris Match and the Sunday Times, regularly travelling abroad on assignment.

His big break came in December 1958, when the American magazine group Time Life opened an office in Istanbul and hired Güler. He later headed the photography department at the magazine Hayat. While studying economics at the University of Istanbul, he began working as a photographer for the Yeni Istanbul newspaper. He also pursued courses in theatre and wrote plays. for his having bought me my first camera”. He started jobbing in film studios where his father, a pharmacist, had connections through selling chemicals for developing film.Īra dedicated his 1994 book A Photographical Sketch on Lost Istanbul “to my father Dacat Güler. Initially Ara set his sights on a career in the dramatic arts. Photograph: AGAVAM/Courtesy of Ara Güler Museum He was born in Istanbul to Armenian parents, Dacat Derderyan and Verjin Şahyan in 1935 a law compelled them to take a Turkish surname. Photography was not his first choice of profession. “I believe that photography is a form of magic by which a moment of experience is seized for transmission to future generations,” he said. “My aim is not to produce art photography, but simply to reflect Istanbul as it really is,” he said, regarding himself as a documentary photographer as opposed to an artist. Güler worked in both colour and monochrome, but the black-and-white pictures tend to have more of this melancholic quality, something the photographer recognised, once observing that “colour photographs lack the solidity of black and white”.ĭespite the depth and complexity of his pictures, Güler was devoid of artistic pretension. Pamuk was particularly taken by the hüzün – a kind of melancholy – evoked in many of Güler’s photographs from this period, in which the mosques, the water and smoke from the ships insistently recur. ‘I believe that photography is a form of magic by which a moment of experience is seized for transmission to future generations,’ he said. “The Istanbul of the 1950s and 1960s – its streets, pavements, shops and dirty, neglected factories its ships, horse carts, buses, clouds, private taxis, shared taxis, buildings, bridges, chimneys, mists and people and the soul in all these things, so difficult to recognise at first sight – is nowhere as well documented, preserved and protected as it is in the photographs of Ara Güler.”Īra Güler in Paris in 1988. “Ara Güler’s Istanbul is my Istanbul,” wrote the novelist Orhan Pamuk in 2009 in the foreword to the collection Ara Güler’s Istanbul. Many regard his earlier Istanbul work, in which he seemed to capture the city’s essence, with the greatest fondness. While he could be positive, poetic and playful, he also showed the harsh reality of life for many of its inhabitants. Güler photographed the city affectionately yet authentically, and became known as the “eye of Istanbul”. Though Ara Güler, who has died aged 90, was a renowned international photojournalist, his great achievement lay in his career-long documentation of his home city, Istanbul.

The eyes of ara photographs