SEARCH RESULT

As the Ara Güler Archives and Research Center, we have the opportunity to explore and deeply examine the many different aspects of Ara Güler’s 70-year photo-journalism career in each of our projects. While reexamining Ara Güler’s world-renowned photo-reportages and photographs, which have since turned into “classics”, we are excited to reveal previously unseen ephemera and photographs, introducing them with viewers for the very first time.

The “Fishermen of Kumkapı” exhibition at the Ara Güler Museum, on view from 8 May – 27 October 2024, takes its starting point from Ara Güler’s series of articles entitled ‘With the Armenian Fishermen of Kumkapı’, published as a seven day serialised report in the Jamanak newspaper from 21 – 27 May 1952. In this series, which Ara Güler prepares with Vartan Ozinyan, his schoolmate from the Private Getronagan Armenian High School, Ozinyan pens the first and last day articles. These articles and their corresponding photographs shed light onto the now non-existent Küçük Deniz (‘Small Sea’) Street, the fishermen’s harbour, the labourers who worked there and a way of life. Through the publication of ‘With the Armenian Fishermen of Kumkapı’ series, published when Ara Güler was only 24 years old, Ara Güler established his place in the realm of photo-journalism at an early age. Constituting one of his most important works helping him garner acclaim in his profession, this photo-reportage also serves as a harbinger of Ara Güler’s imminent successful international career.

Ara Güler visits the Kumkapı neighbourhood frequently following the year 1952, capturing the area together with its people, which he knows will disappear. He photographs the fishing boat headmen, the crew, and the merametçi within their daily lives. The harbour and houses in the area will be completely demolished following the beginning of the construction of the Sirkeci-Florya coast road (today’s Kennedy Street) in 1956. These photographs which Ara Güler took were published in Hayat magazine in 1957 as a new photo-reportage entitled ‘The Well-Known Neighbourhood on its Last Days’. Lastly, in 2010, Ara Güler publishes a trilingual book (Turkish, English and Armenian), “Armenian Fishermen at Kumkapı 1952” from Aras Publishing consisting of the original newspaper articles and a total of 56 photographs, 12 of which are from the Jamanak series.

We received invaluable contributions during the preparation process of our new exhibition, “Fishermen of Kumkapı”, which centres on all this material upon which we have added the findings of new research and accompanying work conducted at our archives. In Ara Koçunyan’s essay entitled “What Are We Doing Here?”, we bear witness to Ara Güler’s relationship with the newspaper in the early days of his career as a photo-journalist. Levon Bağış, on the other hand, presents a look into the historical importance of Kumkapı and its fishing culture in his essay, “What is a City?”. We would like to thank Ara Koçunyan and the Jamanak newspaper team for their support in republishing the photo-reportage, ‘With the Armenian Fishermen of Kumkapı’, on the same dates after 72 years, on the occasion of our exhibition. The original bound editions of the Jamanak newspaper, which Ara Güler delivered to Aras Publishing during the preparation of his 2010 book, “Armenian Fishermen at Kumkapı 1952”, and which have been preserved there until today, have returned to the archives as a result of this exhibition. ‘Who Were the Captains of Kumkapı?’, the essay penned by Vartan Ozinyan for the last day of the 1952 series, is being published for the first time in Turkish and English in this very book, thanks to the support of Payline and Yetvart Tomasyan. Additionally in this exhibition and in the book, unpublished photographs on Kumkapı, various ephemera and contact sheets displaying Ara Güler’s editorial and creative processes are being shown for the first time.

In his article “Kumkapı Fishermen 1950” which he wrote for Istanbul magazine in 1993, Ara Güler recounts that upon hearing that the Kumkapı fishermen’s village was going to be demolished, he returned to the area to take colour photographs, but that these frames were destroyed over the years. “And so, this is all that remains of the lovely Kumkapı fishing village: a few black and white photos and my memories of those dark hours before dawn” says Ara Güler. With the restoration work we have carried out at the Ara Güler Archives and Research Center, the recovery process of these photographs has now commenced.

It is thanks to the visual records which Ara Güler kept through his perpetually curious and inquisitive nature, his pursuit of a subject with passion and determination, the love he held for the city which he lived in and its inhabitants and the importance he gave to documenting that we are able to commemorate the old days of Kumkapı and a culture that has disappeared.

We wish you a pleasant viewing of the “Fishermen of Kumkapı” exhibition and book.