Response time: Kurt Markus photographs Monument Valley

• Paul Weideman I The New Mexican
• Aug 31, 2018   

"I once did a series of interviews with photographers whose work I admire mainly to see how other photographers lived and worked, because we isolate ourselves, pretty much,” veteran photographer Kurt Markus said. “Coming to Santa Fe was like an explosion for me — an explosion of people to see and talk to. I feel it’s a very forgiving environment here, too: No matter what you’re working on or what you’re doing, it’s welcome.”

Montana native Markus and his wife, Maria, moved to Santa Fe five years ago. During his career, he has done advertising campaigns for Armani and BMW; shot for People, Rolling Stone, and Vanity Fair; published three monographs on cowboys; assembled portfolios of nudes, athletes, and fashion models; and filmed music videos for Jewel, Tori Amos, and John Mellencamp. But his work on view at Obscura Gallery is all about nature — specifically, the towering landforms of Monument Valley.

The exhibition, which marks the new gallery’s first solo show, offers visitors an immersion in the austere beauty of the American West. But it was not an objective for Markus. “I had an assignment from Condé Nast Traveler in England in 2002 that brought me to Monument Valley,” he said during a visit to his home studio and darkroom. “I’d never given it much thought, other than the background in The Searchers, and thinking it was a tourist thing. I got lucky the first day with some huge clouds and it just hooked me — OK, this place wants me to come back.

“It’s more of a landscape of sky, so when the sky is really giving it up to you, it feels like a feast,” he elaborated. “But there is famine, and that’s when you’ve made the pilgrimage and you fall back into some other zone and you’re forced to look at it differently, and respond.”

There are dozens of responses to what the photographer encountered at Monument Valley at Obscura, and all but a few are expressed as gelatin-silver prints. This photographer works mostly in the tools of the old school: film camera and darkroom. Shelves in his studio are packed high with negative boxes bearing the inked names Cormac McCarthy, Meryl Streep, Uma Thurman, MC Hammer, Lauren Hutton, Isabella Rossellini, and many others.

In his darkroom — “Kurt’s escape hatch,” his wife called it — the walls are peppered with dozens of photos of another kind of star: Laura Gilpin, Clyde Butcher, Édouard Boubat, Sebastião Salgado, Edward Weston, Bradford Washburn with his 50-pound aerial mapping camera, Elizabeth Taylor with a Rolleiflex camera, and many other photographers.

During our meeting, Markus often mentioned one name in particular. “I go back to meeting Paul Caponigro as being a big moment in my life that kind of cemented me here in Santa Fe. I have the memory of him playing the piano at his place up in the hills here. I’ve never lived in a place until now that had such a strong photography component. I can never print like Bill Clift or Paul Caponigro, but I love the way they’ve approached the work. One of my complaints of what I see in contemporary photography is a certain degree of alienation. There’s no commitment to the emotion of the scene.”

He talked about what he described as Caponigro’s policy of silence — that it is better, when one feels a response to a scene, to make a point of first spending time there without the camera rather than instantly rushing to capture it. But Markus added, “I don’t know that my well is deep enough to really make sense of that. I’m so challenged by the tools that I have and the way that I use them. If I can’t do it with this set of tools, I don’t think becoming a different photographer is really going to help me.”

He has done a lot of shooting with the Pentax 5x7 medium-format camera, but his main squeeze is the 4x5 Linhof Master Technika field camera that he bought new in 1972 or 1973. He still uses 16-exposure film packs in the large-format camera, and like everything else, he develops that film himself. “No one else I know of can do the film packs,” he said. “And I don’t really want to have anyone else do it.”

He develops all of his own film and makes all his prints using the traditional setup of the enlarger or contact-printing frame; processing the prints in trays of developer, stop bath, and fixer; then thoroughly rinsing them. The only exceptions in the Monument Valley show are the largest prints. “Once they get beyond 16 by 20 inches, I go to Steve Zeifman at Rush Creek Editions. He makes those big digital prints. It’s kind of a novelty to me. Handing it off is a very different feeling when you have a one-to-one relationship to the work, keeping your hands on it throughout.”

The most recent photo in the exhibition was taken in 2017, so it represents a 15-year record. “And for me, it’s not over,” he said. An aspect of that portfolio that is not on view at Obscura Gallery recalls a series involving one of Markus’ favorites from the past: photographer Alfred Stieglitz’s pictures of artist Georgia O’Keeffe. “Every time I went to Monument Valley, I took at least one serious picture of Maria in the landscape.”

Some of the framed prints in Kurt Markus: Monument Valley 2002-2017 show skies that are almost black; these tend to accentuate the sunlit rock monuments and especially the huge white clouds. Ansel Adams, another photographer Markus has long admired, used colored filters with his black-and-white films to create exactly those effects. And, especially toward the end of his career, Adams accentuated that contrast between light and dark.

“I do use yellow and sometimes orange filters,” Markus said. “I have definitely left the light camp behind. If I’m going to fail, I want to fail dark. And when I left the idea behind that you have to have detail everywhere, man, I took off. I saddled up my horse and I rode it right down into darkness.

“Photographing sand dunes in Namibia was the perfect example. There’s nothing there but sand, so why do I have to have detail in the shadows?” He contributed an essay to 2003’s Edward and Brett Weston: Dune, a collection of dune images by the two renowned photographers. Markus pointed to a couple of very small prints of his Namibia work, which also boast astounding sand textures and shapes. “These are amazing. This is archival Moab paper printed on an Epson inkjet printer with archival inks. They were taken with the Pentax, but then I found my peace, if you will, using the digital world to satisfy some of my urges.”

He walked over to another stack of boxes. “I’ve done some fashion work, and this is something I just did. I don’t think anybody’s doing 4-by-5 contact prints of Christy Turlington. I can indulge myself a little bit. Every once in a while, I’ve slipped away and tried something new. I’m not sure there’s any rhyme or reason to what I’m doing, except the world’s getting bigger and I want to go smaller.”