|
Turkey's Passionate Interpreter to the World
By Stephen KINZER
This is the Turkey of the photographer Ara Güler: A confused child peers from behind decaying tombstones inscribed with or nate Arabic script. Laborers unload hulking freighters. Couples walk down foggy streets lined with old wooden houses. Men gaze out over their drinks or contemplate rugged landscapes. Autos jam broad avenues. Horses pull carts up snowy hillsides. And Muslim worshipers bow in prayer by the hundreds.
One of the few Turks to have reached an internationally acknowledged pinnacle of creative achievement, Mr. Guler, 69, is driven by a passion for his native land and especially for Istanbul, where he has lived all his life. The rich archive he has produced has made him one of the few Turks with an international reputation.
His photographs hang in many private collections and museums, including the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris and the George Eastman House in Rochester. Last month he was in Washington to open an exhibition of 43 of his Istanbul pictures at Cities, a restaurant in the Adams-Morgan section whose decor represents a different world metropolis every six months. The photographs will be on view until fall.
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 not sentimental, often starkly so, but still full of emotion. Sometimes their constrasts 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, Yaþar 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 carried within him a certain face, a certain smile, a certail 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 Cezanne, 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 100 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 Istabul's is shared by almost everyone of his generation here.
"The real population of Istanbul is one million," he asserted. "Today, 13 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, Armenians and Jews, who became rich here and made this city so wonderful, left for various reasons. This is how we lost what we had for 400 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 a Turkish person like any Ahmet or Mehmet." Mr. Güler dreamed of becoming a film director, but his father gave him a 35-milimeter 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 Özbilici, an Associated Press photographer based in Ankara.
In recent years Mr. Guler has published three lavish books. One is a survey of the work of the great 16th-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," an vivid portrait of Anatolia, and "Vanished Colors," a ode to Istanbul and the Constantinople that lies beneath it. They will be for sale at Cities.
In his studio, amid portraits of figures ranging from Churchill and Bertrand Russell to Picasso and Tennessee Williams, Mr. Güler is hoarding 615 sides 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 and leave". Otherwise who knows? But the pictures will always exist. My pictures are what I leave to the world."
The New York Times
April 13,1997
|
