I WAS BORN A DAYDREAMER, Kurt Markus once wrote, and I know of no slot for one of those on any ranch.
Kurt Markus was raised among just such ranches in rural Montana, and went on to have a storied career as an award-winning photographer. Whether it was shooting fashion models on the streets of New York or charming kidnappers into releasing him in Yemen, wherever Kurt went, he carried the West with him, and he frequently returned to document the people, landscapes and light of his homeland. He published three classic books about cowboys, living and working with them on the range. He was a master in the darkroom, forgoing the “gimmicks and overlays” of digital photography to train himself as a master printer.
I come from an earlier era, predigital, and have seen no reason to quit the kind of photography that has challenged and nourished me since I began making pictures, in earnest, four decades ago, he once wrote for an exhibition of his Monument Valley photographs at Obscura Gallery in his adopted hometown of Santa Fe. In that time, I have grown comfortable with film’s limitations, even to the point of embracing them.
In the two years since he passed away, his wife Maria and sons Weston Montana and Ian Nevada Markus have worked to preserve his work and his legacy. It was an honor to speak with them about Kurt and share some of his work on these pages.
Weston, what’s the burden, if any, of being named after Edward Weston, one of the greatest photographers?
Weston: It’s been kind of a curse because I have two first or two last names, Weston Markus. My high school diploma says Markus Weston on it. When I got older, it made complete sense. I kind of wondered why he was… if he loved this photographer so much, why wouldn’t he call me Edward? What’s with the last name? I can’t say that Weston’s a great name, but every time I meet new people and say my name’s Weston, people love my name. I don’t know. I wish he would’ve named me Michael Jordan or something, but…
I think it’s interesting because when I was born in 1983, my dad had just started really getting into photography, he was still on his first book, After Barbed Wire.
Maria: He was doing cowboy work at Western Horseman. His hero was Edward Weston because all he needed was a river to wash his prints in, like Edward Weston. But he had a dark room, and the dark room was next to our kitchen, and he would work all day at Western Horseman and come home and go into the dark room. When I was carrying Weston, I didn’t know if it was going to be a boy or a girl, and out pops this boy, and Kurt said, We need to name him Weston. I said, Okay, Weston Montana, because that’s where Kurt was born. And he said, perfect. He was like the perfect little baby, and we carried him around in a big, brown van with a seat in the back. We’d go on shoots, go to ranches, and I’d stay in motels or I’d stay in the headquarters and Kurt would go out and shoot, and we’d just drive around the West with Weston in the back.
When you look at Kurt’s photographs, they somehow have a hold on you, like you can’t take your eyes off them. Only a few photographers have that.
Maria: He was patient. Yeah, he was very patient. Also he was very humble. He would make himself invisible to the cowboys. He never got in their way, he didn’t art direct them, he just let them be. He never styled them. He was greatly admired by the cowboys, and he kept up with them, even when his fingers were frostbitten and he had blisters on his legs, he never said anything.
He was a very patient man, and he said he ruined a lot of film, but he never thought of a photograph until he held it in his hands. We met the photographer Bruce Weber, and he was the person that really did turn Kurt’s life around. Bruce bought six prints of the same photograph. Kurt asked me, Do you think he made a mistake? I said, I don’t know. And he goes, It’s the same image.
But Bruce gave the images to Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, other people in New York — to show Kurt’s talent. Kurt was amazing, and as he grew older, his art, his eye really blew me away. His photographs still today going into his studio, they are so beautiful.
How did that patience affect the photographs?
Maria: I remember with John Mellencamp, in the film It’s About You, where Kurt went on the road with John. John was so impatient all the time. He would say, Why are you photographing that bottle? Why don’t you move the bottle over to the light? Kurt would say, No, the light has to come to the bottle.
When we’d stop on the highway and there was just a rock and a tree, I’m thinking, what the hell is he photographing? It would be dark and moody, and then the sun would come out. God was like, oh, now you take your picture. And he was there already.
Weston: I look at it that my dad had a relationship with God or something, that there’s a higher power that looked out for him. I can’t tell you how many times where we’d be rolling up to a location and I’d be checking the weather, right? And I’d be like, I don’t know, Dad, I think it’s going to thunderstorm, and he wouldn’t really care, he wouldn’t get worried about anything, and as soon as we would roll up, it would be cloudy, and it would be shitty, and you’re like, oh, this is going to be a depressing picture, we have no lights, you know, nothing. As soon as the model or whatever we were shooting was ready, the clouds would literally part and there would be this beautiful light streaking down on the subject. He knew that it was going to come.
If he were, and he may well be, listening to this conversation, what would he say about what you just said?
Maria: He wouldn’t be listening to it, because he’d walk away and get into his seat and pick up a book. He was very humble.
Weston: Mom, mom, there would be a few times where we would do a shoot and we’d be heading back and there’d just be me and him in the car, and he’d look at me and say, Man, I nailed that fucker, didn’t I? He had the confidence and stuff, but he never let anybody else know that, he was very humble in that way. But there would be a few times he’d show his colors, and I’d be like, God damn right, dad, you fucking nailed it.
But he always said that self-promotion is cheap.
Maria: I used to take his work to New York, and meet art directors and art buyers up in these huge skyscrapers. This is in the early ‘90s. And I would not even say anything, I would just show them the work, and the work just spoke for itself. Everybody wanted to be a part of it.
My own experience with him was that he was a good listener, and he was very generous towards talent, emerging or otherwise.
Weston: Whenever we were shooting somebody, he never just started shooting. He’d always walk up to the subject with his camera in hand and talk. Nobody else would know what they were talking about, but he spent about 10 or 15 minutes before every shoot just talking to the subject, just talking. And then slowly, he would start taking pictures, and it was like he’d go to first base, and then he’d go to second base, and then by third base, he’s just blowing. He was just shooting. He had a roll going.
Maria: Kurt taught at the Santa Fe Photo Workshops and mentored lots of students. We would have dinners over at the house and he would show the dark room. He encouraged all his assistants to become independent. People have written me so many letters saying that it was the most unbelievable time I spent with your husband because he encouraged me to take photographs and then he critiqued the photographs, and then that made them grow, and he always stayed in touch with all these students.
See, he had wished he had had somebody to teach him, but he just had himself and he taught himself. He was a self-taught, and you could say the same thing about Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, all these photographers.
Part of his process was the dark room. Doing your own prints isn’t exactly the normal thing these days.
Maria: That’s what his magic was. Weston is an amazing printer. And if we were doing ad campaigns, Weston would go in and he’d hand out the negatives and Kurt would go in and make his own photographs. He loved the dark room. We had three dark rooms going all the time. So that was his little world. With his music, his little snacks.
Weston: Yeah, how many prints have we ripped up, Mom? How many…
Maria: Oh my God, thousands.
Weston: He was incredibly particular and frugal. He was such an asshole about making the test strips and then the maps…
Did you say he was such an asshole…
Weston: Yeah, he was such an asshole. He would be like, Oh, this is great, how many times did you burn it? And I’d be like, Fuck, I didn’t count how many times I burned that corner. And he’s like, Always make the map. If you go into his office, to this day, there will be a sticky note on top of the print saying this is the paper he used and it will have a little outline of how many times he burned in this corner, how many times he dodged this side and his whole recipe in those boxes for each one.
Maria: They were like his children. His prints were like his children. And he loved all of them.
I was struck with is his extraordinary writing, just the spare descriptive quality.
Here’s an example: “At times I am saddened that I’m not what I photograph. Always the observer, seldom the participant. What I made remains unanswered. My distance protects me physically and emotionally from getting as busted up as I ought to sometimes, which is why you’re not going to get the whole truth from me. I have an unspoken, unwritten, and generally inscrutable pact with the people I photographed and lived among. If I promise not to tell all I know about them, they will do the same for me. In most cases, I have more to hide.”
Maria: Everybody said that he should have been a writer, but he said, Maria, you’ve gotta put a gun to my head to make me write.
His love was photography. In his mind he saw these photographs like these visuals coming in front of him. Now, you try galloping along on a horse with cameras, camera packs tied to the saddle and taking a photograph. With some of these pictures, in all kinds of weather, he kept up. His work, his early work, today he is revered in cowboy country. That gave him a lot of joy.
What were the irritating qualities about this man that you love?
Maria: He was a perfectionist. We had to do everything properly. Everything had to be in perfect order.
Weston: Yeah, if you went into his bedroom and if you moved round one thing in his bedroom, he would know. Everything in his closet was folded to perfection. I used to steal his clothes in high school – I would wear them and then I would get back before he got home and spend hours trying to refold his clothes, get his shirt exactly how he had it.
Maria: And he knew.
Weston: Yeah, he knew.
He loved the West because of the light.
Weston: If you could see where my dad picked to be buried, it definitely resembles his cowboy days. It is desolate. You know, he loved the quietness, the serenity, the feeling of the wind and the sun and the open sky. He just loved it.
Maria: He was buried in a cowboy cemetery in Tuscarora, Nevada, with cowboys and cow horses.
Weston: In the middle of nowhere.
Since he died, does he feel present to you?
Maria: I felt his presence for a long time. But after we all buried him, he’s now there, he’s home. I’m reminded of him every day when I look at his photographs and I’m carrying on making sure his photographs are going to the right places, the right museums, they’ve gone up quite a lot in value because there’s maybe only two or three prints of certain works. He’s left these beautiful archives for the world to see. It’s a gift.
Does he feel there for you, Weston?
Weston: You know what, this is weird. When I work out in the morning, I see him in me. Like the way that I run, there is something in my cheeks or in my face, I can see my dad in me.
Maria: Edward Weston had Parkinson’s. Myron Wood, his best friend, had Parkinson’s. A lot of photographers got Parkinson’s. You could say it’s from the chemicals, from the fumes, I don’t know. But he wouldn’t have done anything different, you know? And he was just dealt that card, and he used to say, Why me?
Christy Turlington flew out the week before he died, when his Christy book was being delivered. Kurt and Christy worked on that book for a long time. Working on that book kept him alive. Christy was here and Kurt picked up a camera and started taking her picture. I walked into the breakfast room. The kids were out here watching, and I just was very quiet. He shot his last roll of film with Christy Turlington. A week later he was dead.
Just five years ago he said, I’m making the best prints of my life. He started diving back into the cowboys. He’d gone in a full circle, he said. Back to the cowboys.
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Photo Maria Markus
Images Kurt Markus, courtesy Kurt Markus Estate
More at KurtMarkus.com
