‘I Like Your Photographs Because They Are Beautiful’ - Orhan Pamuk

A landing stage in the Salacak neighborhood on the Asian shore of the Bosporus, 1968.
"Ara Guler, who died on Oct. 17, was the greatest photographer of modern Istanbul. He was born in 1928 in an Armenian family in Istanbul. Ara began taking photographs of the city in 1950, images that captured the lives of individuals alongside the city’s monumental Ottoman architecture, its majestic mosques and magnificent fountains. I was born two years later, in 1952, and lived in the same neighborhoods he lived in. Ara Guler’s Istanbul is my Istanbul. I first heard of Ara in the 1960s when I saw his photographs in Hayat, a widely read weekly news and gossip magazine with a strong emphasis on photography. One of my uncles edited it. Ara published portraits of writers and artists such as Picasso and Dali, and the celebrated literary and cultural figures of an older generation in Turkey such as the novelist Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar. ..."
NY Times

Nightfall in the Istanbul district of Zeyrek, 1960.

2012 April: The Museum of Innocence (2008), 2017 September: Istanbul: Memories and the City