Ara Güler is a legend of the photography Turkish, the “Master of Leica” (title obtained in 1962), whose Gallery Polka wants to retrace the long career, which began in the 1950s. The son of a pharmacist in the republic of armenia, Ara Güler was born the summer of 1928 in Beyoglu, a district of Istanbul on the european shore of the Bosphorus, and separated from the old city (historic peninsula of Constantinople) by the Golden Horn. His photo is on there its natural setting.

His father had changed his surname to the Armenian original, Derderian, for those of Güler, more conducive to integration. He made his studies at the Armenian school in Getronagan. As the artist of Paris Sarkis, born Zabunyan in Istanbul in 1938, who represented Turkey at the Venice Biennale 2015, Ara Güler is the fruit of a amount of civilizations and the observer acute in a complex society. Photojournalist at the age of 22 for the newspaper Yeni Istanbul , while he was still a student in economics, he was also the first correspondent in the middle East for Time to its presence in Turkey in 1958.

A true epic feel short in her photos where the human factor prevails over all. From Kazakhstan to Iran, from Winston Churchill to Picasso, he left a fund of 800 000 photos of his death, at the age of 90, in his home town, on October 17, 2018.

Gallery Polka12 rue Saint-Gilles, IIIe arrondissement, Paris, Telephone : 01 76 21 41 30, Hours : Tuesday to Saturday, from 11 am to 19 h. Until , June 15. Catalog : Ara Güler”s Istanbul: 40 Years of Photographs, 2009, Thames & Hudson.