The museum's foundation goes back to the collaboration of Doğuş Group with Ara Güler in 2016.

The opening exhibition featured under the title "The Whistling Man" ("Islık Çalan Adam").

Güler's photographs focus on humans, Istanbul, and Turkey in the second half of the 20th century which shaped the individual and social memory of this location.

[3] The museum houses also an archive and research center ("Ara Güler Arşiv ve Araştırma Merkezi", AGAVAM).

An archive team led by an art consultant at Doğuş Group carried out a two-year project on the classification, inventory, preservation, digitization and indexing of hundreds of thousands of Ara Güler's works.