photos from the edge 37 - ISTANBUL PHOTOGRAPHS

photos from the edge 37 - ISTANBUL PHOTOGRAPHS
Photographs by David Bacon

These photographs taken this summer are my small tribute to the work of the great Turkish photographer, Ara Guler.  His dark, moody images of his beloved Istanbul, taken starting in the 1950s when he was in his twenties, have become the city's visual memory of itself.  In them, people recall and ponder the way it looked and felt before so much was swept away by the modernization of the last few decades, with its tourism and gentrification.

Lillian and I were waiting on the dock in Eminonu for a ferry to take us up the Golden Horn to the huge cemetery of Eyupsultan, when I found a small bookstore and café above the slips where the boats come in.  In what other city in the world, I thought, would you find a place in a ferry terminal to read and buy a book to go with your coffee while you wait.  And in the bookstore there was a little section devoted to Guler.  

That says something about how ordinary people - from the commuters who take the boat to work every day to the students riding the ferry to school - think about him. To Orhan Pamuk, who won the Nobel Prize for his novels in 2006, Guler with his camera was the poet of "the Istanbul of the 1950s and 1960s - the streets, pavements, shops and dirty, neglected factories, its ships, horse carts, buses, clouds, private taxis, shared taxis, buildings, bridges, chimneys, mists and people; and the soul in all these things, so difficult to recognize at first sight." 

I already had a little book of his photographs at home, but waiting for the ferry I splurged and bought a big one.  I sat drinking my coffee and looked to see if I would recognize anything.  When I was sixteen and just out of high school, I took several hundred dollars I was paid when a car hit me years earlier, and used it to hitchhike through Europe.  Starting in Paris I headed east, finally winding up in Istanbul.  

It was 1965, and there were pictures in the book that Guler had taken that year.  I looked at the photographs and marveled at their gritty, earth-connected working-class vision of his city.  I thought, I didn't know how lucky I was to have seen just a little piece of Istanbul as it was then.  

Much as I wanted to rediscover Guler's Istanbul, I knew everything changes.  Guler himself changed, becoming a celebrity Magnum photographer, better known outside Turkey for taking photographs of famous people. But I decided the best way to acknowledge and honor him was to do as he did - look for people in the street, or working in the small shops.  

So many of his images were taken on the Galata Bridge across the Golden Horn, and in the communities surrounding each end of it.  How could I pay tribute to him without just a few photographs on the bridge?  And along with the tourists, there were still the old guys fishing, as he'd seen them half a century ago.

Taking a photograph freezes a moment, letting you see just a tiny piece of someone's life. That fragment can then acquire a life of its own, becoming part of a collective memory of a city or of a people.  That's what happened to Guler's photographs - why they're so honored. But at the time you release the shutter and freeze the image, you're just trying to honor that person you see.  That's not so different whether you're a famous guy like Ara Guler, or just another guy with a camera, like me.