Response time: Kurt Markus photographs Monument Valley
Paul Weideman I The New Mexican
"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.”
Photographer exhibits photos for museum fundraiser
My father, pioneer conservation photographer Philip Hyde, took the summer of 1948 off from Ansel Adams’ new photography school to earn income for school supplies and living expenses. The G.I. Bill for Veterans of World War II paid for his tuition and books. He and my mother Ardis first moved to Plumas County so he could work at the Cheney Mill in Greenville.
That same summer Dad also photographed many ranches in Plumas County. After photography school his work showed in major museums and galleries including the Smithsonian. He became known for his iconic 1960s and 1970s landscapes that campaigned to establish many U.S. national parks and popularized the large coffee table photography book.
Mom and Dad lived in Plumas County more than 50 years. In 1965, I was the second male baby born in Genesee since the 1800s. Meanwhile, Dad became friends with Plumas County Chamber of Commerce manager and Museum Curator Bob Moon. With a bequest from the estate of Stella Fay Miller, Dad, Moon and other community leaders, along with members of the Native Daughters of the Golden West, founded the Plumas County Museum.
Now fittingly, the museum will host the first show of my exhibition, “Agriculture West and Midwest: Visual Stories of a Fading Way of Life from 17 States with Special Emphasis on Plumas County,” from Sept. 7 through Dec. 29.
The opening reception Sept. 7 will run from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. At 6 p.m., I will talk briefly about my adventures photographing farms and ranches in 17 states. I will also share a few experiences from my upbringing traveling the wilderness West and learning basic camera settings from my father after he gave me an all-manual Pentax film camera when I was 10 years old.
For many years, I never made more than a few hundred photographs, until 2009 when I bought a Nikon DSLR. Since then I have made over 80,000 images, more than one third depicting agricultural subjects.
Childhood memories of swinging on ropes into stacks of hay bales in a barn near home made barns a familiar and loved subject that took me deeper into photographing agriculture. At first I kept capturing historic barns because people liked those photographs. However, with the influence of my mother’s green thumb and going with her to local ranches to get manure for the garden or to buy fresh eggs or milk, my interest was in the people, the life and how they worked with the animals. I wanted to preserve for future generations, all phases of farming and ranching in action, especially the styles and methods already disappearing across the country.
Cloudy sunset, Olsen Barn in Chester.
While I traveled in the Midwest for three months in the summer of 2015 in Dad’s 1984 Ford converted van, a reporter told me the state of Minnesota alone loses more than 300 barns a year. Agriculture has changed more in the last 80 years than in the last 4,000. In 1900, there were over 30,000 million American farmers, today fewer than five million. Many small agrarian communities across the U.S. are turning into ghost towns.
Besides photographing our disappearing agricultural history, I also strive to bring to light the differences between industrial agriculture and smaller, more sustainable ways. For example, in the West it has become common to use chutes to hold calves still for branding. However, this year I photographed local ranchers in Indian Valley who still ride, rope and rustle the calves by hand.
The art of agriculture itself is a rich tradition going back to the Dustbowl and the Great Depression. Studying the details and keen eye for observation of Dorothea Lange, one of Dad’s teachers at the California School of Fine Arts — now the San Francisco Art Institute, informed how I photograph farmers and ranchers. She, Adams, Edward Weston, Minor White and other luminaries, who taught Dad at school, all photographed agriculture and set the bar high. Today, Weston’s series of bell peppers have become some of the most prized silver gelatin prints ever made. Morley Baer, also an Adams protégé, photographed barns in California particularly well, as did Carr Clifton, a neighbor and protégé of Dad.
Another example of traditional agriculture, the iconic Olsen Barn and meadow border on Chester at the edge of what is left of the Native Maidu people’s Big Meadows on the shore of Lake Almanor. Feather River Land Trust recently began restoring and stabilizing the base and foundation of the barn that pioneered dairy farming in the area, to keep it from collapsing under heavy snow or wind. I am proud that my photographs of the historically significant barn helped in fundraising for the project. However, many old farm structures no longer get enough use to justify the high costs of maintenance. I hope my project can bring awareness and funding for historical restoration efforts. My goal is to do additional shows of my agricultural work. A book is also underway about some of the crazy and unusual experiences I have had walking onto farms and ranches and the people I met on my journey.
Meanwhile, the Plumas County Museum is also constantly scrambling to raise funds to keep enough employees to properly take care of the collection. Museum Director and Curator Scott Lawson said that besides the papers and biographies of the pioneers of the county, the museum also holds a large collection of tangible objects passed down through generations.
Amish teenage brothers and horse cart near Holton, Michigan.
“We have a little bit of everything that represents what life was in Plumas County over the last 170 years for the Euro-American culture, plus items that represent the life ways of the indigenous Maidu. People gave us these objects and records for us to hold in trust and make sure they are taken care of for future generations,” said Lawson. “We are not the Quincy Museum, we are an all-encompassing facility holding the history of the whole county. We represent all of the towns and the entire Feather River watershed is important to us. We can’t do it all here. We are not in competition with the other 11 local museums, but try to help them as much as we can.”
From time to time, the county budget gets tight and the Plumas Museum Association picks up the slack and keeps the doors open. The association relies on donations from the community for its survival.
The museum has a full calendar of well-organized, quality programs for children and adults. The kids especially enjoy learning the heritage skills from the past like making candles and other goods. Lawson said an example of what gives him the most satisfaction happens when new parents come in with a child or two and mention that one of their own best childhood memories came from a day at the museum.
“We are excited to have a fund-raising exhibition here,” said Lawson. “It is noteworthy that David’s work will be displayed on the Mezzanine Gallery near his father’s 40×50 darkroom prints which have graced our walls since 1969. David Leland Hyde plans to donate to the museum half of all proceeds from the sale of his fine art prints and other small collectibles available during the exhibition. Please enjoy the show and support the museum. The first 50 people to arrive at the opening will receive a keepsake gift.”
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Thursday, August 2, 2018
Terminator teases sixth instalment with all-female photo
A promotional image from the sixth film in the Terminator series shows actress Linda Hamilton back in her signature role as the indomitable Sarah Connor.
Hamilton is joined by Colombian actress Natalia Reyes and Canada's Mackenzie Davis, star of recent release Tully.
Markings on Davis's body seem to imply she is one of the futuristic androids around which the franchise revolves.
Arnold Schwarzenegger also appears in Tim Miller's currently untitled film, due in cinemas in November 2019.
Reyes plays a new character called Dani Ramos, while Davis plays a character known only as Grace. Hamilton, 61, appeared in the original Terminator film as a young woman whom Schwarzenegger's relentless cyborg travels back in time to kill.
She played the character again in that film's first sequel, which reconceived her as a gun-toting warrior determined to protect her teenage son from another murderous robot.
Strong women have been a recurring fixture of the science-fiction franchise, which has so far had all-male directors.
Come with us if you want to relive the series so far.
The Terminator
Released in 1984, James Cameron's modestly budgeted film saw former bodybuilder Schwarzenegger play an implacable android whose human exterior masks a metal skeleton.
Part man, part machine and all business, he has been sent from the future to kill the woman whose unborn son will grow up to become the freedom fighter who brings about the destruction of the computer network that has taken over the world.
Sarah Connor, played by Hamilton, learns she is a target from Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), a resistance fighter who has been sent back in time by Sarah's son John to be her guardian.
Kyle's attempts to save Sarah's life eventually cost him his own, though not before he has made her pregnant - making him the father of the very man who sent him to protect her.
Schwarzenegger's robot has few lines in the film, though one of them - "I'll be back" - became one of his most durable and oft-repeated catchphrases.
For many fans of the series, though, Kyle's first line to Sarah - "Come with me if you want to live!" - is no less loved or memorable.
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
Made for a reported $6.4 million, the original Terminator went on to make more than $78 million worldwide. Small wonder James Cameron had a larger budget to play with - a reported $102 million - when he came to make its sequel.
Much of that money went on creating a new antagonist - a shape-shifting android made of shiny liquid metal whose jaw-dropping transformations saw the film win an Oscar for its visual effects.
Released in 1991, the second Terminator replayed the action of the first by having Schwarzenegger's robot return from the future to protect the teenaged John Connor (Edward Furlong) from Robert Patrick's deadly T-1000.
Hamilton also returns as Sarah Connor, not a damsel in distress this time around but a hardened soldier whom we first encounter incarcerated in a psychiatric institution.
Schwarzenegger's reward for reprising his signature role, besides a reported $15 million pay-cheque, was a brand new catchphrase: "Hasta la vista, baby."
It is understood that the new film will pick up the action from where Terminator 2 left off, ignoring what happens in all the other sequels.
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
Released in 2003, the third film in the franchise saw John Connor, now played by Nick Stahl, under threat again from another robot from the future, this time played by former model Kristanna Loken.
But wait! Who's that coming to the rescue? Yes, it's Arnold Schwarzenegger again, returning as another benevolent Terminator despite having appeared to perish at the end of Terminator 2.
Arnie naturally succeeds in his mission, though the film still ends on a bleak note - a global nuclear Armageddon orchestrated by malevolent computer network Skynet.
Directed by Jonathan Mostow, Rise of the Machines failed to match its predecessor's $520 million takings but still made a respectable $433 million worldwide.
Terminator Salvation
Set in the aftermath of the aforementioned nuclear holocaust, the fourth Terminator film saw John Connor, now played by Christian Bale, team up with a cyborg, played by Sam Worthington, and Kyle Reese, played by the late Anton Yelchin, to battle Skynet's automated forces.
Directed by the film-maker known as McG - real name Joseph McGinty Nichol - the 2009 film made headlines before its release after a recording of Bale berating a crew member was leaked online.
Schwarzenegger's day job as governor of California precluded his involvement in the film, though his likeness was used on an early model of the Terminator seen in one of Skynet's factories.
The resulting film was not considered a success, with one critic dismissing it as "a shambolic, deafening, intelligence-insulting mess" and another dubbing it "a confused, humourless grind."
Terminator Genisys
Released in 2015, the fifth film in the series played with its established continuity by reintroducing the Sarah Connor character and making John Connor a Terminator.
Respectively played by Emilia Clarke and Jason Clarke (no relation), the characters were joined by an older version of Schwarzenegger's original cyborg. Also back was Kyle Reese, now played by Australian actor Jai Courtney, while Britain's Matt Smith appeared as Skynet in human form.
The resulting plot contortions left reviewers scratching their heads. Entertainment Weekly accused it of making "a hash of the saga's mythology", while USA Today's Brian Truitt spoke for many when he said it was "just as ridiculous as the spelling of its subtitle".
The film was initially conceived as the first instalment in a trilogy, but those plans were dropped after it failed to cross the $100 million mark at the US and Canada box office.
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
In the gap between the third and fourth Terminator films, US screenwriter Josh Friedman came up with the idea of continuing the adventures of Sarah Connor and her son on the small screen.
The resulting show, which ran for two seasons between 2008 and 2009, cast future Game of Thrones star Lena Headey as Sarah and Thomas Dekker as John.
Summer Glau played a "good" Terminator, named Cameron in James Cameron's honour, while Garbage singer Shirley Manson played a "bad" Terminator equipped with the T-1000's shape-shifting abilities.
Another TV series was proposed to tie in with Terminator Genisys, though those plans were dropped along with that film's sequels.
10 musicians we bet you didn’t know are also photographers
Find out which of your favorite musicians are also photographers.
Have you ever met somebody so talented that it makes you mad? Joel Birch of metalcore outfit the Amity Affliction is not only a vocalist, but an illustrator, writer and father. The subjects of his film photographs range anywhere from city streets to gnarly surf snapshots.
[Photos via nsixxfoto.tumblr] Using many of his Leica cameras, Nikki Sixx’s black-and-white photographs center around a variety of topics, mainly focusing on circus-like surrealism and documentary shots of homeless communities around the world.
[Photos via Instagarm/ryanscottgraham] State Champs’ bassist Ryan Scott Graham can make some gorgeous photos with a 35mm camera. The vintage style of his photos of people and places range from all over the world, such as Paris and Japan. They make us wish we had a friend who knew their way around a camera like him.
[Photos via Instagram/zacfarro] Since reprising his role in Paramore last year, drummer Zac Farro has taken up lomography, which is associated with a unique, colorful and sometimes blurry photographic image style and an analog camera movement. His quaint photographs give off a retro, psychedelic vibe that reminds us of Woodstock days, and he has discussed his craft with Lomography Magazine.
[Photo via brian-macdonald.smugmug] To learn that PVRIS bassist Brian MacDonald takes photos that are just as mysterious and eerie as his band’s music isn’t all that shocking. He works in both film and digital media, capturing the places he travels to in a new, phantasmagorical light.
[Photos via Instagram/si.delaney] Si Delaney adeptly captures the world around him, but in a way that makes it seem like the shots came out of a movie. Whether he’s taking photos of his friends at a pinball parlor or documenting his travels in places such as Sri Lanka, they are always too beautiful to not stare at.
[Photos via Instagram/maxxsio] When he isn’t banging the drums or snapping pics of his adorable cat daughter (and unofficial Alternative Press mascot), Pistol, Maxx Danziger enjoys playing with color in his beautiful photographs of seascapes, wildlife, nature and, of course, himself. He inclines toward shades of pink and green to give off a certain romantic, utopian aura.
[Photos via ryantphillips.com] SOTY guitarist Ryan Phillips splits his time between traveling with his platinum-selling rock band and pointing his camera at people…and is very good at both. The main focal point of his stunning work is portraits, with an emphasis on musicians, sports figures and lifestyle snapshots.
[Photos via Instagram/caseymoreta] Casey Moreta, guitarist of Hey Violet, can capture light in some truly amazing ways with his camera. He is able to use light sources that might usually be seen as troubling in photos to give his work moods of their own.
[Photos via lukehenery.com] Bassist and camera-enthusiast Luke Henery hails from the land down under along with his alternative rock four-piece, Violent Soho. His photographs are, to put it lightly, out of this world: A master of contrast, action and staging, his work transports its viewers to a different realm, one where they feel they’re a part of the image at hand.
