Whitehorse Ranch, Fields, Oregon
Color photograph by Kurt Markus
Sponsored by Glacier
Bank |
Kurt Markus presents
the legend of the buckaroo with incredible realism absent of slick mannerism.
His timeless photographs explore the rugged yet romantic spirit of the
cowboy. Through this significant body of work, Markus reveals an era
that is all but forgotten today. In his photography, Markus documents
a life style of solitude and difficulty, yet to the viewers, a sense
of romance; a hard life of plain food, plain surroundings, horses, and
exposure to the elements, and yet a simple life free of inherent stress.
His photographic style is reminiscent of the same poetic manner that
Montana cowboy artist Charles M. Russell rendered in paint and bronze
at the turn of the century. Markus, a truly amazing photographer of
the fashion and travel industry, is today an internationally renowned
photographer.
Buckaroo is the debut of Markus’ western photos in Montana, and
the only other exhibition of this work in the United States since its
initial showing at the Cowboy Hall of Fame.
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About
Kurt Markus
Born in Whitefish, Montana in 1947, Kurt Markus began his career photographing
the western landscape and cowboy life, and work in fashion and travel
photography followed. Markus’
work as a photographer is varied. His portfolio includes photographs
of actors, architecture, advertising, athletes, women’s fashion, men’s
fashion, landscapes, musicians, nudes, portraits of famous people, and
travel portraits. His work has graced the covers and pages of such magazines
as InStyle, GQ, Vanity Fair, Esquire, Vogue,
Outside, Rolling Stone, Harper’s Bazaar, Entertainment
Weekly, Elle, and the New York Times.
Today, Markus’ work takes him all over the world shooting for major
clients that include Ralph Lauren, Sony, Calvin Klein, The Gap, Banana
Republic, Warner Brothers, Turner Films, Kodak, Liz Claiborne and his
current project with Steven Spielberg and Dream Works.
Markus’ work has been exhibited and published nationally and internationally.
His books include After Barbed Wire, Buckaroo, Boxers, Dreaming
Georgia, and the new Cowpuncher. Cowpuncher received the
2002 “Wrangler Award” for most outstanding art book of the year
from the Cowboy Hall of Fame. Among other numerous awards to
his credit is a Grammy Award nomination for his photograph used on the
Tori Amos “Scarlet Walk” ad campaign.
Markus currently lives in Kalispell, Montana with his wife Maria and
their two sons, Weston
Montana, 21, and Ian Nevada,16, who is a Sophomore at Flathead High
School. Both of his sons are interested in the world of photography
and are following in their father’s footsteps. Weston works as second
assistant to his father on major photographic shoots and Ian’s photographs
have already been published in Vanity Fair and Outside Magazine.
Markus started taking pictures 25 years ago. He is primarily known for
his sense of realism and his decidedly “unslick” approach to image making.
When asked his idea of beauty, Markus says, “A two-page spread, either
in a magazine or in a book. On one page, great writing, presented in
a beautiful typeface, classically designed, on the opposite, a memorable
photograph. It doesn’t get any more beautiful than that.” About his
work, Markus says, “I have been lucky in my work. I consider it a gift
to have found photography and made my life in it. If I reflect for a
moment on the people I’ve met and the places I’ve been, the memory gives
me both satisfaction and energy. More than ever I am eager to do the
work I love.”
But photography has also brought questions: “Because I live in Montana
and because photography is in many respects a solitary profession, I
have often felt isolated. How does such-and-such photographer feel?
I’ve wondered. How do other photographers who I admire get up in the
morning and ready themselves for picture making?” To answer these questions,
Markus convinced several magazines to assign him to interview other
photographers. He interviewed David Bailey, William Klein, William Clift,
Robert Doisneau, Willy Ronis, Edouard Boubat, Max Dupain, and others.
He describes the benefit of these experiences in this way: “Each of
these encounters has taken me out of my world long enough to be able
to return to mine with renewed eyes.”
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Excepts from Kurt Markus's book Buckaroo
I was not born to ranching. I was born a daydreamer, and I know of no
slot for one of those on any ranch. At times I am saddened that I am
not what I photograph. Always the observer, seldom the participant,
what I am made of 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
entered into an unspoken, unwritten and generally inscrutable pact with
the people I have 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.
My consolation
is a simple-heartedness I would not exchange. The greenest cowboy alive
has my respect, and I have no problem whatsoever photographing people
who are possessed with the determination to do what I cannot. The awful
truth is that I love all of cowboying, even when everything has gone
wrong and it’s not looking to get any better. Sometimes I especially
like it that way.
This book has been inside me from the start, from the day Charlotte
Hill picked me up at the Lakeview, Oregon, bus depot and drove me to
the MC and her husband’s crew and country. That was April, 979 – not
so long ago, actually, but long enough for nearly every outfit I’ve
been on since to have changed considerably. And I’m not saying the changes
have been entirely on the downward slide. It’s just that life in the
Great Basin is different now, and that this book speaks of an era when
you could cross railroad tracks to get to the wrong side of town in
Elko, Nevada. The wrong side is still there; it’s the tracks that are
gone.
The writing that follows is pulled from various sources. I retrieved
some passages from 3 x 5 inch notebooks I pack in my pocket wherever
I go and in which I sometimes write. One of the allowances I gave myself
when I began these journals ten years ago was that I would not return
to them in the future and demand anything, but that was a shallow lie
to myself. In recent days, I dug through them one by one, all twenty-eight
of them. The only things I was able to salvage from the wreckage of
those tormented years of scribbling were a few scraps, and I include
them here to bring a moment or two of immediacy – what it was like then,
as it happened.
The Great Basin never received the attention it has
deserved for so long. It is the region I went to in the beginning and
kept returning to, long after it was photographically necessary. I sometimes
refer to these Great Basin buckaroos as cowboys, and in many instances
the two words are interchangeable. But outside the Great Basin, cowboys
are generally not called buckaroos, unless, of course, they have drifted
out of their home country.
In the last couple years I have become as drawn to the fringe of cowboying
as I am to its heart, so you’ll encounter photographs without buckaroos.
The landscapes are places where cows live; the people either serve buckaroos
in special ways (bartenders, cooks, cobblers, madams), they make the
tools of the buckaroo trade or they speak of the life through art. My
selection of pictures is purely subjective and in no way pretends to
be inclusive.
What is a Buckaroo?
I
found out quickly that the cowboy West isn’t a uniform blend from Texas
to Montana. There are pockets of cowboying, each with its own distinctive
texture of dress, gear, language, and technique.
The West breaks into three groups: buckaroos (Oregon, Nevada, Idaho,
and California), cowpunchers (Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona),
and cowboys (Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Canada).
As certainly as I have made my boundaries, Cowboys draw their own; some
are not going to like the company I’ve put them in. But they will at
least get the drift of my thinking, and most will agree, yeah, it’s
like that.
Discovering the buckaroos was, for me, a shock. Why had no one told
me about them? Why had they been kept a secret in a country that held
the cowboy as its national image?
One thing about most buckaroos, you sure as hell notice them. They look
a lot like the cowboys Charlie Russell painted: open-crowned hats with
short, flat brims; long ropes, often of braided or twisted rawhide;
colorful scarves tied at the neck; high-heeled boots; slick-forked saddles
and eagle-bill tapaderos nearly touching the ground; bridled-up horses
packing silver-mounted spade bits; big-roweled spurs, also silver-mounted;
jinglebobs; vests and dapper jackets from secondhand stores. And pride,
plenty of pride.
In buckaroo country there is a “Californio” tradition of mañana horsemanship,
the movement of a young horse from snaffle to hackamore, to two-rein,
to bridle, which if all goes smoothly, takes years. There is no room
for shortcuts in the system because omissions will show up later.
To many buckaroos, cows are something you train horses on. You are a
horseman first and a cowman second. It is an attitude that controls
their lives. It isn’t surprising that buckaroos put everything they
have into gear.
~Kurt Markus, Buckaroo
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