ISTANBUL – Turkish Daily News
I don’t know if the owner of Ara Cafe, located on the ground floor of the building that belongs to Ara Guler, rents the place or pays a percentage of the income to Guler, this I forgot to ask. The cafe is rather comfortable and is of course decorated with the photographs of Guler. From the wall, factory workers occupied making olive oil look down on us. Tomorrow they will be changed to photographs of the work of the great 16th century Ottoman architect Sinan, who remains perhaps the most influential designer in the Muslim world.
Maybe you are familiar with the story of Guler by now. How he got his first job for an Istanbul newspaper in 1948 and how he was named one of the seven greatest photographers in the world by the British magazine Photography Annual only 13 years later. Or how he took the portrait of many of the finest artists of the 20th century or how he could wait for hours in some inhospitable place for the precise light to appear. “I am not a photographer,” he tells me. “I am a press photographer, it is a very big difference. But in Turkey people mix everything.”
In one interview after another, Guler was asked why he insists on calling himself “merely a press photographer” (probably all the journalists have been hoping that he will finally “come out” as an artist.) But no, he is not an artist, he is photo journalist or a press photographer, he maintains. And I am of this idea that only the untalented artists call themselves “artists,” because it is so vague that it hardly means anything at all. Following that line of thought it is no surprise that Guler calls himself “a press photographer.” But in tribute to him, Yasar Kemal wrote:
“Ara Guler is a great creative artist. 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 carried within him a certain face, a certain smile, a certain expression of pain or sadness. An then, when the time is ripe, he presses the button.” And then he compares the talent of Guler with those of Cezanne, Turner and Gaugin. I find it rather contradictory to interview a photographer. I guess the reason they want to take picture is partly because the can express things they cannot put into words. If you ask them something, they might as well just point at their picture: there is the answer.
You insist that you are not an artist, but you have exhibitions?
Yes. I collected pictures for a new exhibition. It is a very big retrospective of 250 pictures that will open in Berlin soon. It is the collected photojournalism of fifty years. It is about the history and the people. When I ask him how he would describe his achievements over the years, he answers simply that papers give him assignments, as if it was just a clerk or a salesman. We are interrupted. Someone wants to ask him a question. Later on another man wants to ask another question. Then someone wants to give him a letter and then somebody shouts something to him from the other side of the room. In other words: the situation is rather unpractical for an interview. At the same time I guess the interruptions are a measurement of the impact of Guler.
What does a normal day look like for you?
“I develop pictures and take care of my archive,” he says. That might not seem much but he has got a lot of pictures, to say the least. On one journey he took about 10,000 frames of which he selected 200. Of those 200 photographs only four made it to the exhibition.
“A photograph is nothing other than reality,” you once said. Do you still believe that?
“At the time of the shot, it is reality, yes. Two seconds after it’s not reality any more.”
But do you think it is OK to arrange pictures in any way?
“No! I never arrange my pictures.”
Never using dark room techniques?
“No I am not this kind of photographer. Have you seen the pictures of Cartier-Bresson? It is the same thing.”
One of his most famous photographs, and also one of his favourite ones (he calls it “his stamp”) two women kneeling in front of a huge symbol written in black on a white stone wall, saying Allah in Arabic. One photographer told me that the picture is so well composed that a German professor is busy writing a thesis about it.
The lost Istanbul
The most famous book from Guler is probably “The lost Istanbul.” A stunning document of the “poetic, romantic and aesthetic aspect of the city” that now is lost. The city was finished for him 30 years ago. Then all the photographs he wanted were taken, and some years later the objects were gone.
What is it, more precisely that has been lost in Istanbul?
“For example, the buildings are not the same any more. Mentality and education have also changed. They demolished the houses and we lost our identity. This is the sickness of the 20th century. Everybody and everything is the same, in your country, in Iraq, in England and here. Istanbul is not my city anymore. The face of Istanbul is not the same, just look at the Sea-side. In Karokoy for instance, there are no other activities than the ones on the roads and the ones on the tennis court.”
He thinks this disarray has a great deal to do with the disappearance of the Levant. The Greeks, Armenians and Jews, who became rich in Istanbul and “made the city so wonderful,” but then left for various reasons.
“The more educated people,” Guler said, “They are a minority in Istanbul now. I am of Armenian origin. But I don’t want to emphasise this. In Turkey everyone is a Turk, if you ask me. I never accepted being a minority. If I am something, I am part of the majority.”
I want to ask you something. Have you taken photos of famous people?
“Of course I have taken pictures of famous people!” he replies before I finished the question. “They give us education, like Picasso.”
But would you say it’s different to take pictures of a celebrity than it is of someone you don’t know anything about?
“I don’t take pictures if I don’t know the person. If I take the picture of Picasso I already know everything about him. If I take the picture of Dustin Hoffman I know the story of Dustin Hoffman, because he is a friend of mine.” It strikes me that we partly have different notions of what constitutes a celebrity. Nowadays it doesn’t take any kind of achievement to get famous.
I don’t do Carte postale
In 1958, Guler had to go to the opening of the Kemer Dam, between the mountains of Nazilli and Denizli, to take photographs for the center page of the Hayat Magazine. And to cut a long story short, the light wasn’t good enough so Guler and his driver waited until night fell and finally decided to spend the night at a coffee house. In the morning he got suspicious about the place. He walked around and everywhere there were men crushing grapes inside tombs; “the place that’s the hippodrome today was a field, they reaped it with a sickle. They lived both in the Republican era and the Roman era.” There had been an excavation in 1810, then everyone had forgot about it. That is just one example of how Guler captured his subjects, with a blend of talent, luck, experience and stubbornness.
I have heard two or three stories of how you can wait for hours for the right light to appear before you take a picture.
“Yes, sometimes. Because I want to see how the people live and act, how are these people, are they happy or unhappy? I don’t do carte-postal pictures.” He interrupts himself. “Where is my driver? He is not coming back.” He turns around and asks someone — I guess he knows the person — if he can borrow his cell-phone.
Do you follow daily politics?
“Who cares about politics! I hate politics and politicians.”
You don’t think it is important.
“It is not important. Politicians never stay in history long, not like a good painter, novelist or a playwright. They are a hundred million times more important than any politician.
But when you say Istanbul has changed, maybe politics is the way to make it better again?
“It is not changing too much,” he switches,” because no one cares, really. Everyone is shouting for changes, but nothing changes. Take Russia for example. Yesterday it was communistic, now it is not, what difference does it make it for the man who lives in Moscow? They are eating the same food, aren’t they?”
Do you follow the things happening in Iraq?
“Yes of course, but I only follow it for myself. Nobody would send me there anyway because I am too old now to go the war-scenes. Now all the young ones are going there.
What kind of impact do you think you have on the young photographers in Turkey?
Two guys just came here, and they are both photographers making a book about railways. They took some very good pictures, but they are not journalists. Journalists must be very quick. Like this — he snaps his fingers. They are artists, take very good pictures indeed, but journalists? No.
A friend of his, another photographer, Hasan Senyuksel interrupts us. Guler asks him to show his museum to me so that I can understand what he is talking about.”
It takes some time before we manage to open the doors to the museum. But finally we succeed, in a second we are in a room with some of the most well known photographs Guler.
“Oh look at this!” Senyuksel cries out in front of one of the photographs. “The composition is perfect. And he doesn’t call himself an artist. If he is not an artist, I don’t know who is.”
I ask Senyuksel if he thinks that Guler is political. He looks at me, and says, “You don’t see any pictures from tea-rooms or mansions, do you?”
No, I don’t. There are few luxurious environments and not many posh people. The people in the photographs are all, except maybe the celebrities, from the working class. And the places where the photographs were taken are rather shady and for sure lack the trademarks of upper-class places.
“He have always been on the left,” Senyuksel tells me, “that is obvious — just look at his picture. But he doesn’t want to speak about it. You know — he is part of a minority and also one of the most famous photographers in the world. He has a reputation and has to think about the effects of the things he says.”
We leave the museum and go back to the cafe where Guler waits for us. When we return I ask my final question.
How does it make you feel, after you have developed one of the photographs on you wall?
“You are not satisfied with just one,” he answers harshly. “It doesn’t work like that. And besides, no one uses these kind of photographs anymore. They choose one, two or three pictures, not twenty as they used to do.
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