Response time Kurt Markus photographs Monument Valley
Ionce 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 and 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
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 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
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