Ara Güler

The Eye of Istanbul. Retrospective from 1952 to 2013

Ara Güler

Ara Güler (born 1928) travelled around the world with a Leica in hand, but he paid singular homage to Istanbul, his native city on the Bosporus. His images capturing street life, the hustle and bustle of the big city, and the everyday life of its people are unparalleled. Güler’s pictures brim with impressions of enchanted mansions and overgrown gardens, melancholy alleyways and storefronts, and the maze of the city’s streets with their traffic of horse carts, buses, and taxis.
Ara Güler was self-taught, but soon found himself in demand internationally as a photographer. In Paris he was introduced to Henri Cartier-Bresson by Marc Riboud, and he joined the agency Magnum. He travelled for international magazines such as Time Life, Paris Match, and Stern, and his portraits of Brigitte Bardot, Winston Churchill, Indira Gandhi, and Pablo Picasso are well known.
As early as 1968, the MoMA in New York City considered him one of ‘Ten Masters of Color Photography’. He was honoured as ‘Photographer of the Century’, ‘Documentalist of the True’, and ‘Visual Historian’, but he is best characterised by the epithet ‘The Eye of Istanbul’.