EIGHT FEET TALL
Kurt Bauer
Words by Thomas Pokorn.
Horses are impossibly strange: half a ton of coiled muscle wrapped in velvet skin, eyes like polished stone set too far apart to ever fully meet yours. They exist in their own frequency, operating on instincts older than language.
To ride is to leave your world behind. Suddenly you’re eight feet tall, moving at speeds your body was never designed for, trusting an animal that could kill you with a kick but chooses partnership instead. The ground becomes irrelevant.
Perspectives shift, fences shrink, distances collapse, fear and exhilaration blur into one continuous galloping heartbeat. From horseback, you see what they see: the world as movement, threat, and possibility. A plastic bag becomes a predator. A shadow, a canyon.
Their nerves fire through the reins into your hands. You become half-human, half- something wild. It’s a deal struck without words: your balance for their power, your trust for their surrender. And for those moments, you inhabit their universe entirely with wind, speed, muscle, breath.
Then you dismount. Gravity returns. The spell breaks.
But some part of you never fully comes back.
Kurt Bauer
A self-taught photographer, Kurt Bauer is something of a romantic with a sharp eye for detail. His images reflect this interplay between the clarity of the expression and the indefinable aesthetic experience that arrives as quickly as it departs. Born and based in Austria, Bauer works with clients to tell a visual story representing identity playing with the aliveness of the moment.
