“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.”
