“I understand the smell of Istanbul,” the Turkish photographer Ara Güler used to say. And nowhere is the pungency of the city sharper than in his images of working boats on the Bosphorus. Having given up ambitions to be a film director, Güler devoted himself to making pictures in the 1950s as postwar democracy established greater press freedom. His first published story, on the city’s Armenian trawler boats, almost caused a riot at his newspaper office, when the fishermen turned up to protest about the fact that he had shown them swigging alcohol as they set out at dawn.
This picture was taken in the old caulking yards of Karaköy. The young man in the foreground invites you to imagine not only his life, but those of his colleagues beyond, at work or in conversation. “There is nothing without humans,” Güler said of his pictures. Though his image perfectly frames two distinct worlds, the skyline of mosques and minarets, and the waterside realities of shacks and barges and tyres, it is the people who count. “It was never about what venue I shot,” Güler said. “I shot pieces of life.”
Güler died in 2018, aged 90. This picture is included in an exhibition and retrospective book of 70 years of his work. He became, in the 1960s, the pre-eminent photojournalist in Turkey. He would carry with him four different Leica cameras on assignment, labelled for the different outlets for which he worked – Time magazine in the US, Stern in Germany, Paris Match in France and Hayat in Istanbul. The separation helped him think about what each audience might want, he said. It also gave a clue to his lifelong determination. He was never an artist, always a photojournalist: his aim, he suggested, was to be the honest “eye of Istanbul”.
• A Play of Light and Shadow by Ara Güler is at Foam, Amsterdam, 23 June to 8 November. An accompanying monograph is published by Hannibal Books
