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Mr. Güler dreamed of becoming a film director, but his father gave him a thirty-five-millimeter camera when he was a child, and he became obsessed with it. In 1948 he got his first job, as a photographer for an Istanbul newspaper, and since then he has made his living taking pictures. For a while his work appeared regularly in the Istanbul daily newspaper Hürriyet, and in 1961 a British magazine, Photography Annual, named him one of the world’s seven greatest photographers.

Yet today his pictures are rarely published in Turkish newspapers. “A shame for the Turkish press,” lamented one of his younger colleagues, Burhan Ozbilici, an Associated Press photographer based in Ankara.

In recent years Mr. Güler has published three lavish books. One is a survey of the works of the great sixteenth-century Ottoman architect Sinan, who remains perhaps the most influential designer in the Muslim world. The other two books, both of which appeared in 1995, are All the World in Their Faces, a vivid portrait of Anatolia, and Vanished Colors, an ode to Istanbul and the Constantinople that lies beneath it.

In his studio, amid portraits of figures ranging from Churchill and Bertrand Russell to Picasso and Tennessee Williams, Mr. Güler is hoarding 615 slides for what he hopes will be his next and most ambitious book. They make up a collection of brilliant color pictures he has taken during a lifetime of world travel, with large selections from India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, the Philippines, Kenya, Senegal, and other countries that he describes as “paradise for photographers.” An Istanbul printer has told him, however, that it will cost at least $150,000 to produce the book.

“What publisher will pay that much for a book that will be so expensive to buy that people will only look at in bookstores for half an hour and then put it back on the shelf?” he mused. “If Kodak sponsors it, it will come out. Otherwise who knows? But the pictures will always exist. My pictures are what I leave to the world.”

In the Thick of Change Where Continents Meet

BRIAN LAVERY

BY NOW, even if you’ve never read a single book by Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk, he needs little introduction. The only other Turkish writers to have achieved similar levels of acclaim are Yashar Kemal, author of Memed, My Hawk, and Nâzım Hikmet, who is primarily a poet—and neither has become quite as internationally renowned as Pamuk, whose books have been translated into fifteen languages.

Pamuk is, by all accounts, a true bibliophile. It’s been said of him that his source of inspiration is more literature than life, and his reading is encyclopedic. At the end of an interview that appeared in The New York Times Magazine (May 4, 1997), writer Fernanda Eberstadt asked Pamuk if he had considered living elsewhere. He replied that, yes, he could easily move to New York or Paris, “with guilty conscience.” He adds, “All of us Turkish intellectuals have moments of exile, feeling estranged by the coups or by this new fundamentalism. My first thought is always, how will I take my library?”

BRIAN LAVERY was a staff writer for The New York Times from 2000 to 2006 and is now an associate at McKinsey & Company.

DUBLIN—As a Turkish writer who is also published in the West, the novelist Orhan Pamuk is often laden with an ambassador’s burden, and in the two years since the September 11 attacks it has grown only heavier.

Mr. Pamuk, who grew up in a wealthy Istanbul family, has lived in Switzerland and Manhattan and keeps up with trends in American modern art. Through research for his books, he also knows better than most of his countrymen Turkish Islamic traditions and history, which were all but erased by secular twentieth-century reforms.

As Turkey weighs its political relationship with the United States and aspires to European Union membership, life in Istanbul is a constant balancing act between conflicting influences, which makes change inevitable, Mr. Pamuk said. But he rejects the ambassadorial role, he said in a recent interview here