Having visited and loved the city of Istanbul, I naturally drawn to this documentary about Ara Güler, the celebrated photographer. He was nicknamed the Eye of Istanbul for his photographs that captured the city across decades beginning from the 1950s and much other work besides. Unfortunately while the man and his work are worthy subjects, this documentary itself is unremarkable, amounting to being little more than a straightforward hagiography that feels almost like a commercial for his legacy orchestrated by Güler himself.

This is laid out as a fairly standard biography that covers all of the usual bases. With his father being a pharmacist who supplies makeup supplies to performers, Güler was drawn to the world of arts from an early age. He started out being interested in cinema but soon enough moved to photography, working for newspapers and later magazines. His eye for composition and forging a narrative from photographs is soon enough acknowledged and he is accepted as a peer of the world’s greatest photographers. He later expands his body of work to include far-flung assignments, including to warzones, and to portraits of celebrities. The film emphasizes how he spends time and effort to cultivate relationships with even the most reclusive of celebrities to gain their trust. It also collects quotes from other photographers and art experts about how important a figure Güler. Meanwhile in the present age the man himself is actively involved in organizing exhibitions of his work and still takes photographs.

Güler passed away a couple of years after the release of this documentary and it seems that his wish of having some sort of permanent institution be dedicated to the preservation and study of his legacy remains unfulfilled for now. This documentary itself assigns directorial credit to two people but they barely matter at all and has no real editorial angle of its own and everything is clearly done with the approval of Güler himself. This is ironic as Güler insists that the power of his own photographs lies in the fact that every shot has an embedded narrative so as to garner interest and drama. By contrast, this film is so blandly deferential and plays things so safe that it would be better if there had been no commentary at all and this was just a barebones presentation of Güler’s work. The worst thing about it are the interviews with experts and other figures of note and every line that they speak starts with “Ara Güler is someone who is… ” We get it already, this documentary is about Güler and he is a highly respected figure. There’s no need to keep reminding us about it. Directors who were actually competent would have edited that out or chosen soundbites that avoided feeling so repetitive.

The photographs themselves are great of course. My favorite scene is when Güler shows a photography of two women eating beneath the Arabic script for god written at a gigantic scale. Not only does he plainly explain the narrative he set out to establish here. that of humans eating of the bounty of god, he also shows that he took many shots of the two women but only one particular shot works because it shows the word above the heads of the women at just the right angle. It makes for an excellent lesson on how the story is something that the photographer himself creates and not something that necessarily existed in the first place. I do wish the documentary had gone in more detail about Güler ‘s love for Istanbul and his claim of being a child of Taksim Square. Perhaps it would have been too politically sensitive to actually say too much on the matter. As it is, his claim to be close to the common folk feels a little hollow as not much is said about this, while at the same time we see that he plainly goes to so much effort to take portraits of famous people.

That the documentary also chooses to include some comments by Güler that actually aren’t that insightful is further proof that the directors just really want to let him express whatever he wants without having much input of their own. Güler’s repeated statements that people of times past, meaning his generation, knew how to appreciate and enjoy life, while nowadays people are only interested in making money, is tiresome and shows a lack of empathy with ordinary people. Perhaps people are finding it difficult merely to survive in modern Turkey? That admission certainly would be a political statement. More astute directors would have left that out and focused on the interesting things that he says about how he takes photographs. Again, the photographs themselves are fantastic and Güler himself is a clearly one of the world’s great photographers. But that doesn’t mean that he’s especially wise or knowledgeable when it comes to anything else. Anyway this is a bad documentary that ill serves his legacy. It might be better to find out more about him and his work from another source.