Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [92]
Because Ara Güler’s photographs penetrate so far below the city’s surface, they convey a deeper sense of the true Istanbul than most visitors can absorb. They are unsentimental, often starkly so, but still full of emotion. Sometimes their contrasts seem to reflect Mr. Güler’s disgust with a country that he believes has thrown away much of its cultural richness. Always, however, they are infused with a poignancy that has made their creator the leading graphic interpreter of this city and this country.
“Ara Güler is a great creative artist,” Turkey’s most prominent living writer, Yashar Kemal, wrote in a recent tribute. “He delves deeply into both nature and man. The picture he captures in a single moment is the result of years of research. For years perhaps he carries within him a certain face, a certain smile, a certain expression of pain or sadness. And then, when the time is ripe, he presses the button.”
Mr. Kemal compares Mr. Güler’s talents to those of Cézanne, Turner, and Gauguin. They are rich in flowing patterns, and he acknowledges having learned his technique through years of studying great painters. But in an interview at his cluttered studio in downtown Istanbul, he insisted that he is merely a “press photographer.” (He works regularly for major magazines, including Time, Paris Match, and Stern.)
“If it’s art, it’s art,” he said with a shrug. “If it’s not, it’s not. Other people will decide that one hundred years from now. Photography looks like art, but art has to have some kind of depth. Painting is art. Music is art. Who is an artist, Yehudi Menuhin or Vivaldi? One is only an interpreter. Photography is interpretation. I can stand for an hour in front of a picture by Ansel Adams or Eugene Smith or Cartier-Bresson. You can see that they have a visual education. But that does not make them artists. I hate the idea of becoming an artist. My job is to travel and record what I see.
“Art is something important,” he continued. “But the history of humanity is more important, and that is what press photographers record. We are the eyes of the world. We see on behalf of other people. We collect the visual history of today’s earth. To me, visual history is more important than art. The function of photography is to leave documentation for coming centuries.”
Mr. Güler spends much of his time seeking to document what he calls “the lost Istanbul,” which he believes is not appreciated or even known to today’s young people.
“What they know is the junk of Istanbul,” he said. “The poetic, romantic, esthetic aspect of the city is lost. I understand the smell of Istanbul. Istanbul became my subject because I was born here, grew up here and know this place intimately. But the great culture I knew is gone.”
It is a truism that everything everywhere was better in the old days, but Mr. Güler’s lament for Istanbul is shared by almost everyone of his generation here.
“The real population of Istanbul is one million,” he asserted. “Today, thirteen million people live here. We have been overrun by villagers from Anatolia who don’t understand the poetry or the romance of Istanbul. They don’t even know the great pleasures of civilization, like how to eat well. They came, and the Greeks, the Armenians and the Jews—who became rich here and made this city so wonderful—left for various reasons. This is how we lost what we had for four hundred years.”
Not everyone remaining in Istanbul is an Anatolian peasant or even an ethnic Turk, however. Mr. Güler himself is of Armenian ancestry, though he says he has always considered himself “just