From Supermodels to Strangers on a Street, Kurt Markus Photographs a Range of Human Experience

In addition to candid shots of the American West and the streets of Havana and Paris, fashion photographer Kurt Markus has shot supermodel greats like Cindy Crawford and Christy Turlington for an assortment of top-tier glossies. At Verve Gallery in Santa Fe, much of his fruitful career is on display in “The Fashion Years 1987–2014,” a retrospective of his various photographic pursuits.

The power of Markus’ work comes from an outsider perspective and what he describes as an ambivalent attitude toward the fashion industry. “At heart and in practice,” he has said, “I’m small town, far from the centers of this crazy, wonderful, self-important, stupefying, challenging, enthralling, very weird and embraceable industry.”

Markus often treats body forms like landscapes, with keen attention to light and shadow. He has photographed many landscapes—most famously in the American West—with the same dramatic contrast of tones and romanticized vision he applies to his human subjects.

“What I’ve embraced from my mentors, both dead and alive”—Bruce Weber, Irvin Penn, and Robert Doisneau among them—“is their belief that photography can take you to places outside yourself, that photography intensifies living, seeing.”