NEW YORK (Anatolian News Agency)–Turkish Armenian photographer Ara Guler was presented with a “Lifetime Achievement” award at the Seventh Annual Lucie International Photography Awards in New York on Monday.
Guler could not attend the ceremony for health reasons, but another Armenian photographer, Sarkis Baharoglu, received the award on his behalf.
Born in Istanbul in 1928, Guler is widely considered the most important living representative of creative photography in Turkey, and has a well-established international reputation.
He began his career in journalism at the newspaper Yeni Istanbul in 1950, and then became a photojournalist for Time-Life in 1956 and for Paris Match and Stern in 1958. Around the same time, he also joined the Magnum agency. The British Journal of Photography Year Book, published in the United Kingdom in 1968, named Güler one of the seven best photographers in the world. In 1962, he received the “Master of Leica” award in Germany.
Guler has held hundreds of exhibitions of his work all over the globe. He has interviewed and photographed numerous celebrities, from Bertrand Russell and Winston Churchill to Arnold Toynbee, Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali.
Many examples of Guler’s photography can be found in institutions such as the French National Library in Paris and the Sheldon Collection at Nebraska University, as well as in private collections in Boston, Chicago and New York. His photographs are also on display at the Ludwig Museum and at Das Imaginare Photo-Museum, both in Cologne.
Based in Los Angeles, the Lucie Foundation was established to support the field of photography around the world. The foundation provides scholarships to young photographers and organizes workshops on photography.