What Ara Güler, “The Eye of Istanbul,” Saw in His Homeland | The New Yorker

Before he became a photographer, Ara Güler was a projectionist, working the screen at the old Yıldız Cinema in Istanbul. As a young man, Güler enrolled in drama school, inspired by the thespians who once frequented his father’s pharmacy to buy makeup supplies. But it was cinema that helped set the stage for his life’s work. “A photograph, too, has a mise-en-scène,” Güler says in “The Eye of Istanbul,” a 2015 documentary about his life and career. “A photograph has a background.”