I'm Listening to Istanbul 1950 - 2010

Since the 1950s Ara Güler has recorded in his photographs everything that attracted his interest, first as a journalist for the daily newspaper Yeni İstanbul and later for international magazines like Time-Life. Ara Güler's goal in his photography has been to reveal the rhythm of a city, to observe its people, to identify certain scenes and to compose them into appropriate forms for a photograph. In his photos we don't make new discoveries, rather we find scenes from life, not in the extremes of an artistic atmosphere, but in the multitude of moments that make up ordinary daily living. The aesthetic of Ara Güler's photography has its roots in his vision of man in his real and true environment; just as in the poetry of Oscar Wilde, we find nothing in his photographs reflected in a delicate or elegant manner. Everything he documents is exactly what it is, the way he has experienced it.