Ara Güler’s photographs show Istanbul to be a place where traditional life carries on regardless, where the old combines with the new to create a humble music that speaks of ruin and poverty, and where there is as much melancholy in the faces of the city’s people as in its views; especially in the 1950s and 1960s, when the last brilliant remnants of the imperial city- the banks, hans and government buildings of Ottoman Westernisers – were collapsing all around him, he caught the poetry of the ruins.
/Orhan Pamuk/
U svojoj autobiografskoj knjizi Istanbul, memories and the city, Orhan Pamuk, dobitnik Nobelove nagrade za književnost 2006. godine piše o melankoličnom gradu svog djetinjstva i mladosti, o tome zašto ga nikada nije napustio. Svi citati uzeti su iz ove knjige.
Conrad, Nabokov, Naipaul – these are writers known for having managed to migrate between languages, cultures, countries, continents, even civilisations. Their imaginations were fed by exile, a nourishment drawn not through roots but through rootlessness; mine, however, requires that I stay in the same city, on the same street, in the same house, gazing at the same view. Istanbul’s fate is my fate: I am attached to the city because it has made me who I am.
/Orhan Pamuk/
A photograph by Ara Güler perfectly captures the lonely back streets of my childhood, where concrete apartment blocks stand beside old wooden houses, and the streetlamps illuminate nothing, and the chiaroscuro of twilight – the thing that for me defines the city – has descended. (Though today concrete apartments have come to crowd out the old wooden houses, the feeling is the same.) What draws me to this photograph is not just the cobblestone streets of my childhood, or the cobblestone pavements, the iron grilles on the windows or the empty, ramshackle wooden houses – rather it is the suggestion that with evening having just fallen, these two people who are dragging long shadows behind them on their way home are actually pulling the blanket of night over the entire city.
/Orhan Pamuk/
…I have always preferred the winter to the summer in Istanbul.I love the early evenings when autumn is slipping into winter, when the leafless trees are trembling in the north wind and people in black coats and jackets are rushing home through the darkening streets. I love the overwhelming melancholy when I look at the walls of old apartment buildings and the dark surfaces of neglected, unpainted, fallen-down wooden mansions: only in Istanbul have I seen this texture, this shading. When I watch the black-and-white crowds rushing through the darkening streets on a winter’s evening, I feel a deep sense of fellowship, almost as if the night has cloaked our lives, our streets, our every belonging in a blanket of darkness, as if once we’re safe in our houses, our bedrooms, our beds, we can return to dreams of our long-gone riches, our legendary past. And likewise, as I watch dusk descend like a poem in the pale light of the street-lamps to engulf the city’s poor neighbourhoods, it comforts me to know that for the night at least we are safe from Western eyes, that the shameful poverty of our city is cloaked from foreign view.
/Orhan Pamuk/
If the city speaks of defeat, destruction, deprivation, melancholy and poverty, the Bosphorus sings of life, pleasure and happiness. Istanbul draws its strength from the Bosphorus.
…
This waterway that passes through the centre of the city is not to be confused with the canals of Amsterdam or Venice or the rivers that divide Paris and Rome in two: strong currents run through the Bosphorus, its surface is always ruffled by wind and waves, and its waters are deep and dark.
…
To travel along the Bosphorus, be it in a ferry, a motor launch or a rowing boat, is to see the city house by house, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, and also from afar, as a silhouette, an ever-mutating mirage.
/Orhan Pamuk/
II. AT posjetio je 15. ožujka 2013. u Malom salonu u Rijeci izložbu crno-bijelih fotografija Are Gülera, jednog od najznačajnijih svjetskih fotografa. Ara Güler fotografskim aparatom,nobelovac Orhan Pamuk perom, prikazuju Istanbul kakvog više nema, njegovu melankoliju. Fotografije su preuzete sa službene mrežne stranice Are Gülera, citati su iz Pamukove knjige Istanbul, memories and the city u kojoj se nalaze i mnoge od Gülerovih najpoznatijih fotografija.
Literatura:
http://www.araguler.com.tr/ (pristupljeno 8. ožujka 2015.)
Pamuk, Orhan. 2006. Istanbul, memories and the city. Faber and Faber. London.
Vera Katalinić, ožujak 2015.
