Ara Güler Quotes In English: Brilliant, Harsh, Unfiltered

Ara Güler is widely known as a giant of photojournalism and one of the defining visual chroniclers of Istanbul. He repeatedly rejected the “artist” label and insisted on a more grounded identity, closer to someone documenting life and writing history with a camera. That same attitude appears in his language too: direct, impatient, anti-pretension, and often intentionally abrasive.

This is exactly why translating Ara Güler is harder than it looks. The challenge is not only language. The real challenge is tone. If you clean him up too much, you lose the sting. If you polish every sentence, you erase the person speaking.

Some of the quotes below may disturb or offend readers. A few include profanity, insults, and slurs. I am keeping the force and roughness of the original wording as much as possible because a softened version would be misleading.

Some Ara Güler lines already circulate in English in published interviews and articles, but many do not, or appear in inconsistent forms. The translations below are mine. If there is any mistake, the quote itself may still be correct in Turkish, and the error may be in my translation, not in the original line.

“The best thing is not to be born. Then the whole thing is over. If I had never been born, you would not be interviewing me right now, for example. I would have been comfortable.”

“In photography’s golden age, there was no deformation and no Photoshop. Photography was the closest thing to visual truth. Photography is ruined now, it lies. But the photography I knew did not lie. It showed the truth.”

“All those people walking around calling themselves artists are faggots. Now if I call myself an artist too, should I become one too? I cannot deal with this. I do not have time. I have work to do.”

Note: The insult and slur in this quote are not softened on purpose. The goal is to preserve the original tone rather than make it more acceptable.

“Real artists do not care about any of that. They have discovered the metamorphosis inside the world. They think about that. They realized the rest is nonsense.”

“The world is not intellectual enough. The people of the world are made up of idiots thinking on top of emptiness.”

“I go and ask, ‘Where is room 100?’ at a hotel. They say, ‘Brother, this is 98, the next building is after this one.’ The man does not know where room 100 is.”

“The artist is the one who writes the music. Chopin. Beethoven. The one who plays the music is the violinist. They are the ones who perform the work of art. The artist is the man who makes the art. Why should I care about the performer?”

“Everything works for philosophy. Everything exists to produce material for the man called the philosopher. All of humanity, politicians, states, presidents, they all exist to prepare what a philosopher will say. Religion is one leg of philosophy. The philosopher says the final word in this world. The rest is nonsense.”

“Society does not know what it wants. It is a society of fools. The most ignorant masses in the world are societies. They are good for nothing.”

“The easiest thing is not dying. I will not die. I will still exist in my works and say ‘hello’ to you. Is Shakespeare alive or dead?”

“As I get older, my swearing comes to the foreground. It relaxes me. I feel like cursing everyone on my way out.”

“Do you know why this city is my city? Not because of homeland-and-flag slogans. It is because I lived my loves here, I pissed on some corner over there, I got beaten up here, I beat some guy there. I have a past in Istanbul, my smell has soaked into its walls. That is what ‘homeland’ means, understand?”

“If I came to the world once again, I would want to be a tram!”

“First of all, I suffer. In between, I take photographs.”

“If the best camera took the best photograph, then the person with the best typewriter would write the best novel.”

“Love makes a person happy. There is a look there, you feel something when you look at a woman’s face, those things matter. How many people understand this? To understand this, you have to be human, not a log. There are too many logs now.”

“I take photographs without adding lies to life. If I bring in a light and place it there, that becomes a lie, understand? I transfer the present moment as it is to future times, I place it next to them. If you bring in a model and photograph her, that is not photography, it is trash, understand? Photography has become a free shortcut to calling yourself an artist. They buy a camera, take three or five mediocre shots, and say ‘I am an artist.’ What part of this is art? Are you Mozart? I do not want to be an artist and all that nonsense, understand...”

These quote translations are mine. If there is any mistake, the original Turkish quote may still be correct, and the error may be in my translation.