Kent Gunnufson (b. 1946) is a Granby-based photographer and broadcaster. His “PhotoTalk.TV” website, which began life as a community television program in 1993, is a unique archive of interviews with some of the state’s foremost late-20th century practitioners. In total, Kent estimates that he has over one hundred interviews archived. Among his subjects are Cole Weston, John Ward, Hal Gould, James Balog, Mark Sink, and Al Weber, the founder of the Victor School summer workshop near Colorado Springs.

In 1994, Kent became an independent producer for NBC and CBS’s affiliate KCNC-4. His segments promoted local artists and were part of Mosaic’s programming that won a national award in 1998. Kent’s award-winning documentary Bumming Colorado’s Ski Country was an official selection of the Breckenridge International Festival of Film, and received a Platinum Remi Award at Worldfest Houston in 2014. His books include Tracking the Snow-Shoe Itinerant (1981) and the recent Rocky Mountains: A Self-Portrait (both Snowstorm Publications). This interview was conducted on Zoom in June 2021.

A hanging tree was created from erosion initiated by the road cut near the top of Hooser Pass, Summit County, Colorado, circa 1978. From *Rocky Mountains - A Self-Portrait.*

RJ: Where did you grow up, Kent?

KG: In southern California. We took a trip at least once a year. When I was eight years old, we went to Yosemite and I insisted on taking pictures. My dad trained me how to use his little Argus C3 camera. I took all the pictures on that trip, and right away it was a passion.

RJ: Was that a little half-frame camera?

KG: No, it was a 35 millimeter full frame, film camera. But all manual - it was a popular camera after the war. They were a nice little camera.

RJ: Were you looking at other photographers’ work?

KG: Not until later. When I went to college, I inspired my roommate to get more into photography and he in turn started inspiring me. He showed me Ansel Adams's picture of Mount Williamson, and it changed my whole life.

RJ: Did you support yourself through photography right away, or did you fall back on a profession?

KG: I was born into the construction trades. All my uncles were contractors. My dad was contractor; he was a tough worker. I learned all the way through school - I was always working summers in construction. Then I got a degree in small business management (from the University of Colorado) and moved to Aspen.

When I got there I tried like hell to find a job that fit my degree. There was just no availability - everybody in the town had a degree. But they needed construction workers really bad. My experience was so much more than theirs, but I started working as a journeyman. It was my only choice up there.

RJ: That was around '66, '67?

KG: Right. From '65 to '69.

RJ: Did you have to go to Vietnam?

KG: No, I didn't. And one of the reasons I went to Aspen right after graduation was that I thought I would be going to Vietnam. And I thought, Why disrupt my life someplace when I can just go there and have some fun for a while, and then go off [into service]. But I had some serious medical things that kept me from getting in.

RJ: You created your book The Snow Shoe Itinerant (above two photo galleries) by matching original 19th century text by a Methodist minister named John Lewis Dyer with your own images. How did that come together?

KG: Well, I was looking for an idea for a book, and I saw Eliot Porter's book on John Wesley Powell’s trip through the Grand Canyon, I think it was. (1) He put the historic texts with his photographs, so when I became aware of John Lewis Dyer, I'm thinking, I could put my pictures to his words, and that's where that came from.

RJ: So did you match the words to the photographs or the photographs to the words?

KG: Really neither. I edited his texts and considered the more interesting parts. I edited out a lot of his rantings on religion and put some of his quotes next to some of my pictures. His family all loved it. They said it was the best interpretation of his diary they’d seen. They really loved it.

RJ: Did you have to get their permission to do it?

KG: No, it was all public domain.

Two page spread from *Rocky Mountains - A Self-Portrait.*

[In the early eighties, Kent was showing his work in several commercial photo galleries. On the advise of gallery owner David Hills he also made a formal portfolio of his images, to promote sales.]

KG: Right after I did the portfolio, Colorado went into their recession and things just stopped. And I had to leave the area just to go to California to find work. When I came back in 1990, Denver was still in recession so I'm still working construction trying to survive, taking care of my son, when I started my PhotoTalk series, at DCTV. I was going to do some promotion of my work through a video - that's why I started it. Then I got into documenting other people's stories.

RJ: Right. So how did you pick up your background in broadcasting?

KG: [ECTV] was a professional facility with broadcast cameras and equipment you could check out, crews, sound rooms, editing suites, and they would basically teach you the industry. I'm like, ‘Wow, I like this,’ and I learned. So PhotoTalk was all me as a newbie learning the process, it was all just learning.

RJ: Where are those tapes now?

KG: Some of them are online [on PhotoTalk.TV], but I've got all these archives. I've probably got over 100 interviews. I started out just wanting to do your average photographer who was serious about their craft. And one of my crew people said, ‘Oh, well, we do so-and-so’ [celebrity people] so I got to thinking, Well, it doesn't hurt to ask.” And what I found out was, there was a need for these people to show their work and express their ideas. So yeah, I got accepted by just about everyone I asked.

RJ: Have you transcribed the interviews?

KG: No, but it's something I’ve wanted to do.

Al Weber at the Victor School, ca. 1980.
*Kent Gunnufson: How much do you evaluate someone's technical abilities in a print, to give it credibility?*
Al Weber: Well, I expect craft. That's personal. Some people are very anti-craft. … If you buy a house, you'd like the door to fit, you'd like to have the roof not leak, you'd like to have the toilet flush. When I look at a photograph, I'd like it square on the mat board flat, no rocks underneath it. I'd like to have the scale all there, minimum grain. And minimum grain might be a lot of grain. But I'd like to see the craft, not only on a photograph, but I like craft in everything. I like it in houses. I like it in cars. Yeah, I like it in cameras. From PhotoTalk.TV interview, 1993.

RJ: I know that Al Weber is someone who’s been very important to your career. He was a fine art photographer who taught with Ansel Adams at the Yosemite Workshops for almost twenty years, and locally is well known for operating a summer photo workshop in Victor, Colorado in the seventies. Can you talk about him and your experiences at his school ?

KG: What I really enjoyed about Al, he was so strong. He's convictions were so strong. Al had many programs at the Victor Shop; one of them was just touring around Colorado and visiting artists and stuff. He'd call me and ask, What are you doing this afternoon? I got a group of about fifteen, twenty people here. Would you consider coming down and meeting with us? And bring some of your work.” I’d say, “Oh, sure.” And that was all very last minute, I was just stopping in, so that was fun.

In one of my PhotoTalk interviews he talks about black and white being the artist's medium and color being on the fringes. But he just felt very strongly about color and that's what he did [in his own work]. And eventually the art world totally accepted it.

RJ: Your biographical publication, Rocky Mountains - A Self-Portrait [images above] was published recently. Can you tell me about that?

KG: I spent a whole year going through press proofs, and I would like to say that I'm so excited about this project because it's not just a picture book. I really believe that my texts and the quotes and everything all tie together to tell a story that’s more than just any individual story working by itself. And I'm really excited about getting that out.

RJ: Well, Kent, I really have appreciated being able to go to your website and listen to those interviews. It's been a great source of information. Thank you for meeting with me.

KG: Well, thank you. That means a lot to me.

(1) Down the Colorado: Diary of the First Trip Through the Grand Canyon; words by John Wesley Powell, photographs by Eliot Porter (1969).

View the PhotoTalk.TV interviews online here. Rocky Mountains - A Self-Portrait is available from Mountain Magazine, Amazon and other online stores.

The Colorado Photo History blog is the online presence for “Outside Influence,” a book project by Rupert Jenkins. Please leave a comment or a suggestion for future posts, and visit @coloradophotohistory on Instagram.

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This coming March, 2023, RedLine Denver will open “typed live, excuse errors, A Mark Sink Retrospective.” Billed as “the interconnected world of family, community and art,” the show celebrates Mark’s life and contributions to Colorado’s photo community. He is the sole founder of Denver’s Month of Photography and is an original founder of the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. He also organized The Big Picture street art projects, The Denver Salon, its offshoot The Internet Salon, the Denver Collage Club, and his own brick and mortar gallery.

My personal interactions with Mark date back to my earliest days in Denver. Literally within hours of meeting him I was sitting in a bar participating in an informal salon led by some of Denver’s leading artists. Since those days we have worked together on the University of Denver’s 2011 Warhol in Colorado exhibition (see May 07, 2021 blog post), and collaborated on many exhibition and fundraising initiatives in conjunction with the Colorado Photographic Arts Center and Month of Photography. Most recently, Mark has been helping me gather information for this blog and my book on Colorado’s photo history, and I have been chipping in to help with his RedLine retrospective.

This interview is presented in two parts, edited from transcripts of numerous meetings and interviews conducted online and at his home since 2011; it was most recently edited in collaboration with Mark in late fall 2021. “typed live, excuse errors” opens with a reception at RedLine on Saturday, March 11th, 2023, 6-9 pm, and runs through Easter Sunday, April, 9th. It is presented as part of this year’s Month of Photography events. For a full listing, visit https://denvermop.org/

RJ: Like you, your parents were very active in the arts community. Can you describe them to me?

MS: My dad moved to Denver in 1950 and was the Denver Associate to I. M. Pei from 1956 to 1960. He formed his own successful architectural firm, got a lot of prestigious commissions and awards, chaired the Denver Arts Commission for fifteen years—1968 to 83. I joke that he was a hedonistic dude—two-martini lunches and smoking in the offices - it was the Mad Men days. My mom was very social but not hedonistic! They were both art activists, co-founders of the group AFCA—the Alliance for Contemporary Art—that eventually brought the Denver Art Museum (DAM) its first contemporary art curator, Dianne Vanderlip, and Gio Ponti [architect of the DAM’s first permanent building at 13th and Bannock]. They were a small group of people who wanted to introduce a more contemporary vision into Denver. That’s when Otto Bach was saying “no photography” at the DAM.

RJ: That would have been the early 1970s. Were you in school or university then?

MS: I enrolled at Metro State (now Metropolitan State University of Denver) in 1978. Early on I explored more academics and liberal arts, but I got terrible near-failing grades. Then I found art. More than that I found that Metro had amazingly great facilities to make art. Printmaking, pottery, sculpture, and painting and darkrooms. I was in heaven, and it came so easy for me.

Students around at that time are artists today like J. John Priola and Eric Havelock-Bailie, Reed Weimer, and a great inspiring artist, Wes Kennedy. We would be very irreverent, tearing, folding, and scratching photo paper. We made Stan Brakhage-like videos that we projected onto photo paper and made giant prints. We did performances using print-covered walls to make an environment. Up all night, high on making work. It was a great time—there was something in that mid-seventies period.

RJ: There’s a post on this site about your meeting with Warhol in 1981. How did that affect the trajectory of your life?

MS: Meeting and becoming friends with Warhol was of course life changing—it gave me great belief in myself. I would fly to NY, stay in the Hotel Chelsea and run around with Andy and the Factory crew and other artist friends. We went on a few dates. Once to the Odeon where Mick Jagger was waiting at the table for us. Pretty mind boggling to be thrust into all that. Back home in the Metro labs, I’d develop the hundreds of rolls of film I shot in NY. I was pretty lit up by it all, but I did keep it to myself quite a bit because it was such a surreal two worlds.

I opened a commercial studio and I made artwork with my toy plastic camera and photographed artists’ artwork for a living. I was doing my Famous Face Polaroid series. If you walked up to a famous artist or actor with a Nikon they would tell you to go away, but a Polaroid allows you in. You’re making this sort of performance event—I was doing long exposures, painting the light in, key light, hair light, background light, while they held still. The results were amazing. The sitter always wanted to see it and often asked for more. It would get me work and contacts, and it led to my meeting stars, from Lauren Hutton to Uma Thurman. It was my shtick, my calling card that I would take around town.

RJ: How did your career as a curator develop?

MS: Before Warhol, on my days off from Metro State, I worked for one of the only contemporary art galleries in Denver at the time, the Sebastian-Moore Gallery—Christy Sebastian and Mimi Moore. I was taught how to hang and light shows, and the over-all exhibition cycle of cards and mailings, marketing and press releases. They left for a month once; when they returned, they offered me a pink Mao Andy Warhol as payment. Silly me, I turn it down!

Carol Keller was then director of the Emmanuel Gallery on the Auraria campus and was very open to show ideas. I did several shows there. John Deer Doe was my first important one—a gathering of experimental artists and performers. I didn’t even know what the term curator was. The flyer says “coordinated by Mark Sink.” You know, it was very early on and I was realizing I’m gathering people. This is the reoccurring theme you’ll see all the way up to present day.

I didn’t curate much in New York; I was busy staying afloat shooting artwork for galleries and fashion. I found a small cheap room and put a darkroom in and started making prints again. That led to my first show in NY at the Willoughby Sharp Gallery, called 12 Nudes and a Gargoyle. It was my Diana toy camera work and it was exciting to sell out the whole show! Pace/MacGill Gallery bought some prints. Overall, to show in NYC that was very exciting for me—a dream come true.

Denver Mud People in New York City, ca. 1985

RJ: In the eighties you were involved with performances in Denver and New York by an eclectic group of artists known as Mud People. How did that evolve?

MS: A wonderful artist named Mark Antrobus and I collaborated with a group of artists to be like the mud people we had seen in that great book by Irving Penn. [Three Asaro Mud Men, New Guinea, 1970. ] Our first event was in Denver around 1980. We called it “Urban Aborigine Week.” We started out just wearing cardboard and junk things we found. Then we started making paper pulp helmets and mudding up doing events.

When I was living in New York in the mid-1980s, the Denver people came and we did Earth Day. We made the front page of the Daily News! Later People magazine. The New York Times picked us up. People were gathering around us, wanted to touch us. … One day the brown and black community around Fashion Moda Gallery in the South Bronx was fired up, dancing in the street with us. The next day we did it in Soho and the people there pretended we didn’t exist. But people loved us at Grand Central Station.

Back in Denver in the nineties we would crash the Cherry Creek Arts Festival. At first they tried to get us arrested, then when we made the front page of the papers they invited us back and gave us a tent and paid us. We made mud Polaroids and gave them out to people, kids, muddied them up (above). But that’s when the group fell apart, when we got sanctioned by the festival. The same sort of thing happened with The Denver Salon, which we’ll get to.

End. Part Two will be published early March. (Updated February 4, 2023.)

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Colorado Photo History

This blog is the online presence for Outside Influence: Photography in Colorado 1945-1995, a book and research project by Rupert Jenkins. Publication date: November 2025; publisher: University Press of Colorado.

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