Ara Guler's Istanbul

Description

Ara Guler's Istanbul is a vivid photographic record of daily life in the cultural capital of Turkey from the 1940s to the 1980s. Captured through the unerring lens of the award-winning Ara Guler, the 'Eye of Istanbul', the city's melancholy aesthetic oscillates between tradition and modernity. As the crossroads between Europe and Asia, Istanbul has lived through several empires and has a character that is as many-layered as its history - something that Guler's photographs convey with great sensitivity. These remarkable black-and-white images are accompanied by an evocative foreword by Orhan Pamuk, the first Turkish recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Both writer and photographer were born in Istanbul, and each in his youth held the ambition of becoming a painter. Here, each in his own way paints a brushless picture of his home town and captures, through the image and the word, its very soul.

Born in 1928,Ara Guler is not only one of the masters of photography inTurkey, but holds a prominent place in the pantheon of the world's great photographers. In 1958 he became a photojournalist for Time-Life, Paris Match and Der Stern. He has received countless awards, and has photographed many luminaries includingWinston Churchill, Indira Gandhi, Bertrand Russell,Alfred Hitchcock, Maria Callas, Marc Chagall, Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso.

'Turkey's greatest photographer ... Guler's work asks age-old questions about progress and innocence, and ultimately leaves it up to the viewer to decide which is more important to society' - Amateur Photographer