The question usually shows up before the coffee is gone. Where did that come from?
It’s a small thing, a splinter of curiosity that works its way up from nowhere, and it must happen to everybody. There was a time when a question like that died right there in bed. Answering it meant a library, a reference desk, an afternoon. Now it means four seconds and a thumb.
This morning the splinter was barbed wire.
I got there sideways. My daily Readwise highlights had loosened something, and what floated up was After Barbed Wire, a book of cowboy photography I found years ago at an antiquarian bookseller in San Francisco. It’s a big book with few words and a great many monochrome pictures of men and horses and the empty West.
Thinking about the book made me think about the words in the title. Barbed wire. Two words, and both of them cut. You find it all over the West, and why is obvious: it keeps animals where they belong. What I didn’t know was how. Who looked at a fence and thought, what this needs is teeth?
The National Park Service answered, in a brochure from Homestead National Historical Park in Beatrice, Nebraska. Before 1874, it says, homesteaders mostly let their cattle and sheep roam the open prairie, sharing grass and water with everyone else. This was the open range. Cowboys drove herds to the eastern markets. Plains Indian tribes followed the buffalo. Pioneers bound for Oregon, California and the Mormon Trail rolled through. Nobody owned the horizon.
Then came a Michael Kelly, who in 1868 twisted two plain wires into a cable that could carry barbs. Six years later Joseph Glidden, a farmer from De Kalb, Illinois, locked a simple barb into a double strand and took out the patent. His version was cheap, easy to mass produce, and it worked. It spread across the Plains the way a good idea spreads, and for the first time a homesteader could draw a line on the land and make the line hold.
Later this morning I took our copy of After Barbed Wire off the shelf and sat with it again. The man who made it was Kurt Markus.
I met Kurt once on his home ground. In 2018 I was taking a class in Santa Fe where he was a guest speaker, and it turned out the classroom was close to his house and studio. So one afternoon I arranged to visit. He had recently moved there from Montana with his wife. A few short years later he would be gone, taken by illness. What I remember is his studio, which looked exactly the way a serious professional photographer’s studio should look, and Kurt walking me through his prints while I browsed. Kurt worked exclusively in film. No digital for him.
One of his prints stopped me. It was a portrait of a cowboy named Burt Ancell at the Bell Ranch in New Mexico. Burt sits on the sill of a closed doorway, wearing chaps, a rope looped around his knee, looking straight into the camera. The tonality of that print is something I still can’t describe. Kurt printed his film the way he did everything, to precision, and you could feel it in the blacks. I left Kurt’s studio with a copy of the print. Burt’s image is in After Barbed Wire.
There’s another Santa Fe story, and this one involves ice.
In 2019 I booked a classic portraiture workshop taught by Kurt and Arthur Mauskopf. I couldn’t wait for it to start. I flew from San Francisco to Albuquerque and drove north in the early evening, watching the thermometer in the car fall as the road climbed. By the time I reached Santa Fe it was thirty-two degrees and a light, thin precipitation was coming down.
The next morning I had breakfast with some of the other participants, everybody a little giddy about the days ahead. Afterward I stopped by my room for my camera gear and stepped out the door to walk over to the classroom building. I made it about ten steps.
I never saw the black ice. I felt my feet go, felt something close to a backflip, and then I landed on my right hip, directly on the car keys in my right pants pocket. The pain arrived fast and total. I knew right away it was serious, because I couldn’t move without it getting worse. A couple of the workshop participants had been walking behind me, and they got to me quickly, but there wasn’t much they could do except call 911. So I lay there on an iced sidewalk, getting colder, while they brought blankets and we waited for the ambulance.
I spent the rest of that workshop week in a hospital bed in Santa Fe. The surgeons put a titanium rod in my broken right femur, and then I had to learn how to walk again. My wife flew down to be with me while I recovered. When I could finally show the rehab team a little self-mobility, they let me go home. On the way out of town we swung by the workshop location, because Kurt had asked us to. In a get well card the whole class sent me in the hospital Kurt’s comment was: “Keep the faith!” It was good to see him again talk with him once more. I stay in the car with the window rolled down. I wish I’d recorded our conversation. Then we headed out of Santa Fe and drove on toward the Albuquerque airport and home.
I think about that whole episode a lot. And how he wanted to see me before I left town.
So this is a story of where this morning went: from a question about a fence to a man who made beautiful pictures of the people who lived behind them. I know a bit more about barbed wire than I did at breakfast. And somewhere in the middle of all the looking up, I found out there’s an older photography book called Before Barbed Wire, which I suspect gave Kurt his title.
A man who prints film to precision doesn’t choose a name by accident.