The darkroom was where he was happiest. That may seem like a paradox — the man famously associated with the West’s wide-open spaces and the cowboy’s love of clear mountain mornings was most at home in a cramped space where light is welcome only in judicious doses.
You had to know something about the quality that defined Kurt Markus — supernatural focus — to appreciate that many of the times he felt most alive were spent alone, working in a fickle medium with methods fast fading from the scene. Modern photography is mostly about manipulating computer programs. Darkrooms are anachronisms. He didn’t ply his trade on horseback (Well, sometimes he did, actually.) but as a man out of time Markus
