Ara Güler's Cannes Negatives Leave the Archive

CANNES! gathers pictures Ara Güler took at the Cannes Film Festival during the 1950s and 60s, drawn from negatives that had stayed in his archive until now. Portraits of Brigitte Bardot, Sophia Loren and Grace Kelly are the recognisable part of the selection, but the exhibition is more interesting where it shows what Güler was actually looking for: the passage between stage and backstage, the waiting that happens outside the range of the other cameras.

Güler has long been read as a photographer of İstanbul, and this selection complicates that reading by showing the same eye at work in a festival crowd, on assignment and under deadline. It also points to a wider issue: a photographer's hundred famous frames tend to cover tens of thousands of negatives, and how large archives are sorted and digitised in Turkey remains under-discussed. The exhibition opened on 22 April 2026 and runs to 11 October 2026 at the museum in Bomontiada, Şişli. Most prints are small and reward close looking.