Mentor Appreciation Week - Kurt Markus

April is a crazy month for me, with in a short period of a few weeks, My friends Paul (April 5) and Ian (April 2) in New York, My dad (April 6), and two of my mentors, Art Kane and Kurt Markus (also April 6) and me on April 10 have birthdays. That is a lot of Arian's to contend with.

Anyway, it seems like the perfect week to talk about mentors. Using two of my own as examples of why mentors and mentoring is important in the artist's development.

Kurt Markus, is a photographer based in Kalispell, Montana. Kurt and I met back around 1988. He had recently released a book, After Barbed Wire, to great acclaim and his photography of cowboys and horses was segueing to models and fashion. His photo agent referred Kurt to me as a photo assistant, familiar to the challenges of shooting Fashion in NYC.

Kurt's career, like many of the photographers I worked with was not the photo-school path, Kurt had many different paths before photography, the one I choose to follow was that he was a writer / editor of Western Horseman. Knowing of Kurt's writing career, really sets the tone for his photography career. Kurt has a deep understanding of photography's history and it's place. He understands and has control over this interpretation of life and light.

And that is what Kurt taught me, by example his, "code of a photographer." His version of Gene Autrey's Cowboy code. His respect for his subjects, his production team, his locations, and his work is something I have adopted.

Another lesson is one of simplicity, his selection of light, his selection of composition, of location, of gesture. Simpler is better.

Having worked for a conceptual creator in Art Kane, it was a valuable lesson to realize that a photographer does not always have to go into a photograph with too much of an idea. But a sensitivity to the space, light, subject may be enough.

a valuable lesson, for today's emerging photographer, was the importance of the craft of photography. Sometimes, it is trendy, especially in the fashion photo world, to not have a complete understanding and practice for the craft of photography or it's history. Kurt respected both.

To my good friend and mentor Happy Birthday. April 6