Inside a café, Tophane, 1959

I had not yet been born when Ara Güler took his first photographs, in 1947. I first noticed his name when his photographs appeared in the news weekly Hayat during the 1960s. Whenever the newspapers of the 1970s needed a photograph that realistically reflected the spirit of the city at work, they knew that Güler would provide them with the best images.

A young girl in Zeyrek, Fatih, 1982

Because Güler was also known as a photographer of famous writers and artists, it was when he first took my picture in 1994 that I felt I had finally achieved recognition as a writer. But I only really got to know him as a person when I was working in his archives in 2003, doing research for my book Istanbul. What I wanted were not the famous Güler images that anyone would recognise: I was looking for backstreet scenes that would reflect the hüzün, or melancholy, I was describing and the black-and-white mood of my childhood.

I had written most of Istanbul by then. But I kept finding details that I should have put in my book. What I came to realise – what I had learned, through heartbreak, while I was working on the book – was that to write a memoir is not to review all of one’s memories, preserving each in turn, but to forget almost all of them, creating instead a story from those memories that refuse to go away.

While I was working in the archive, I saw the attention Güler paid to his subjects – fishermen mending their nets in cafés, unemployed men drinking in taverns, children patching up car tyres in front of the crumbling city walls, rubbish collectors, porters, leather dealers and road builders, apprentices forced into heavy work when they were still boys, fruit sellers pushing their carts through the streets in search of customers, the boatmen who rowed the people of Istanbul from one side of the Golden Horn to the other, commuters waiting at dawn for the Galata Bridge to open, and those who drove the first shared taxis of the day. And I was reminded that Güler always expresses his connection with the city through its people.

A street scene from Eminönü, 1954

The city does not merely serve as background, nor is it there to evoke strange, poetic or exotic images: Istanbul remains an inalienable part of the people Güler has captured. I have seen some of Ara Güler’s photographs so many times that I now confuse them with my own memories of Istanbul. I often catch myself saying, “I passed through this place, I saw these things, too; I was there; yes, that’s exactly how it looked” – these sentiments not so much a recognition of Ara Güler’s Istanbul as an Istanbul of the past, as a personal struggle to reconnect with my own memories, to convince myself that what I am seeing is not a photographer’s “art” but life itself.

Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006

‘Ara Güler’s Istanbul’ is published by Thames & Hudson at £32. To buy the book for £25.60, plus p&p, call the FT ordering service on 0870 429 5884 or visit www.ft.com/bookshop