We lost Ara Güler in 2018. Just one month ago, on October 9th, the unexpected death of another – wonderful – Armenian photographer living in Istanbul, Manuel Çıtak, made me think of the paradox of being an Istanbulite, which is who I am above all else.
The deaths of these two masters remind us that there is great irony indeed in the fact that those who captured the most noble, profound, and humane moments for Turkey, or rather, for the Turkish aspirations, belong to a group that they wanted to erase and eliminate from their country: the Armenians.
Ara Güler once said in 2002, “If I hadn’t taken their photographs, Turkish literature would have remained faceless,” referring to the exhibition “100 Portraits,” which showcased his portraits of Turkish writers. Indeed, if it weren’t for the master photographer, who the British Journal of Photography Year Book called “one of the world’s seven best photographers”, there would be no portraits of most of the Turkish writers of this day. Although their names may not have been heard on the international stage, writers such as Yakup Kadri, Ahmet Hamdi, Orhan Veli, Sait Faik, and Cevat Şakir, each of whom holds great significance for Turkish literature, come to life in readers’ minds through Güler’s lens. Additionally, world-renowned names like Yaşar Kemal and Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk were not only the subjects of his photographs, but also his close friends.
It’s not just individuals that he brought to life. Many themes, from archaeology to urban life, from the lives of working people to the world of the devout, have gained a new perspective and vitality in Turkey through Ara Güler’s eyes. Without him, not only Turkish literature but also Turkey itself, especially during its now-lost period of transformation from the Ottoman Empire to Republican Turkey, which primarily entailed the erasure of memory, might have remained faceless. For someone like me, born and raised in Turkey, an Armenian Istanbulite, this would be a great loss that even thinking about is quite daunting.
To an outsider, this appears to be a great contradiction. But for those who understand the ancient and complex spirit of this country, it’s not surprising at all. Life is like this, difficult to explain, woven with spontaneous and naturally occurring facts, and this is true even more so in some geographies. Perhaps the secret to why there are still Armenians living in Turkey today, despite its history of devastating violence, lies in these “unexplainable” aspects.
Could Ara Güler’s Armenian heritage have played a role in his transformation into a “photo eye” that seemingly followed, scanned, observed, and recorded Turkey like Vertov’s “camera eye”? Could it be related to his coming from a community that had been pushed outside of life and forced to cling to the land it lived on, paying the price through being silenced and supressed? Perhaps, as a reaction to being pushed to the margins and forced to live within the boundaries of his own small community, Ara Güler became a constantly observing eye. An eye that was both from the outside, more than a Turk could ever be, and from the inside, more than a foreigner could ever be. Maybe being an Armenian, living within the Turkish and Muslim majority, was one of the fundamental secrets of his magnificent shots.
Manuel Çıtak, just passed away, age 61, due to a heart attack, and left behind a grieving wife, the novelist Şebnem İşigüzel, and two beautiful children. There are people you know, even if not intimately, whose goodness you can sense in your heart, and whose high moral character you are sure of. Manuel was one of them. Talented as a photographer and trustworthy as a person, he was authentic.
Manuel Çıtak was born in Malatya in 1962. Like almost all Armenian families in Anatolia at the time, his family migrated to Istanbul. He studied at Saint Joseph French High School in Istanbul and the Faculty of Fine Arts at Mimar Sinan University. He began to appear in the press with his photographs in the 1980s and worked at various newspapers, magazines, and projects. During his student years, he began taking photographs on his trips through Turkey. In his photographs, he mostly focused on capturing people and engaged in portrait work. He photographed significant figures such as Adalet Ağaoğlu, Orhan Pamuk, and Füreya Koral, as well as ordinary individuals who were part of daily life, including Madam Anahit, Anahit Yulanda Varan, known as the accordion-playing woman of the Flowers Passage in the heart of the city, on the famous Fish Alley, just off Istiklal, the core of the old cosmopolitan neighborhood.
He did documentary photography work such as “Miners” in 1994 and “Kilyos Shore” panoramas in 1996. Although he participated in many group exhibitions, his first solo exhibition, “Islomania,” was opened in 2022 at the “Depo” of Anadolu Kültür, a civil society organization that believes in the unifying power of art for the coexistence of different identities in Turkey. What a risky initiative in a country like Turkey. Unfortunately, the outcome is directly proportional to the risk taken: Osman Kavala, the founder and chairman of Anadolu Kültür, has been held in prison for six years on unjust political charges by the political authorities.
While mourning Manuel’s death, I was surprised to see how little information about him was available on the internet. For a sought-after artist who has been part of Turkey’s photography and media world for nearly forty years, there were only a few photographs and limited information in online sources. Manuel was one of those people who spoke through his work. As an observer and interpreter, he preferred to stay out of the spotlight, perhaps allowing his work to remain pure and more genuine.
With this aspect of his personality, I immediately saw the connection to his Armenian heritage. During the period when the Ottoman Empire modernized, photography spread and became popular through Armenian and Greek photographers who had closer ties with the West than their Muslim compatriots. Thus, Manuel Çıtak, like Ara Güler, became one of the last links in the chain of Armenian photographers that started with Pascal Sebah in the late Ottoman Empire, continued with Abdullah Freres (Vicken, Kevork, and Hovsep Abdullah), Photo Phebus (Boghos Tarkulian), Gülmez Brothers (Yervant, Artin, and Krikor Gulmezian), Dildilyan family, Garabed Baghdasarian, and, after the founding of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, Maryam Şahinyan’s Foto Galatasaray and Osep Minasoğlu’s Stüdyo Osep, and many, many others.
It may seem surprising to have a number of prominent Armenian photographers emerging from Turkey’s small and introverted Armenian community. However, for those who are aware of this history, there’s nothing new on the eastern front. Even as we feel the dissolution of this longstanding tradition deeply with the passing of Manuel Çıtak, we know that there are a group of contemporary photographers, from Ani Çelik Arevyan to Silva Bingaz, Aramis Kalay to Sarkis Baharoğlu, Vazken Değirmentaş to Masis Üşenmez, who are ready to press the shutter with their ever-observant eyes. Whether Turks, Armenians, or the world are aware of this, each of these photographers, with their unique artistic identities, as descendants of the generation that survived the genocide, continues to look at Turkish society from a unique perspective that no one else can, deeply understanding it from the inside. Manuel Çıtak, one of the representatives of this last generation of Armenian photographers in Turkey, will now live, just a little bit, in the photographs he and his friends shot, with his mischievous, playful, and complex spirit.
Rober Koptaş is a writer and publisher, lives in Istanbul. He served as the editor-in-chief of Agos newspaper from 2010 to 2015 and the general director of Aras Publishing from 2015 to 2023.
Also read: Letter from Instanbul: Turkish Republic of Impunity
