Unpublished photographs from the archive at Ara Güler Museum.
The Ara Güler Museum opens its archive on the photographer’s years at the Cannes Film Festival, presenting a body of work largely unseen since its original publication in the 1950s and 60s. Stars, crowds, and the spectacle around them, captured with equal attention.
Ara Güler first travelled to the Cannes Film Festival in 1957. He kept returning. The photographs he made there, published in Yeni İstanbul and Hayat Mecmuası, were his, and then they went into the archive, and stayed there for decades.
CANNES! brings them out for the first time. Unpublished frames from the golden age of the festival: Brigitte Bardot, Sophia Loren, Grace Kelly, Federico Fellini, Orson Welles, Jean Cocteau, Michelangelo Antonioni, François Truffaut. But also the photographers jostling for position, the fans, the beach, the street, the party. Güler photographed the spectacle and everything surrounding it with equal attention.
The exhibition unfolds across three chapters, the city as stage, the festival itself, and the celebrations after dark, accompanied by original contact prints, press cards, newspaper clippings, and festival ephemera from the archive. What emerges is less a portrait of celebrity than a portrait of a particular kind of intensity: the world, briefly, at its most luminous.
On view at Ara Güler Museum, Bomontiada, Istanbul.
