Colorado Springs senior photographer's new exhibit inspired by Dante's 'Inferno'

In the depths of the pandemic, Peter Zurla stumbled into Dante’s “Inferno.”

After falling down the online rabbit hole, the 83-year-old Colorado Springs photographer found himself wrapped up in the classic piece of literature. He tried to read the original text, following Dante through nine circles of hell, but it was tough to understand. So he found other, more digestible translations of the work, and as he read he began to dream about using his old photos to illustrate Dante’s tale.

“Then it becomes this obsession that gets strange,” Zurla said.

He spent two years parsing his photos that stretched back to the ‘70s, manipulating them and creating composites to depict the journey into hell. His new exhibit, “Journey Into Hell — ‘Inferno,’” is open through April at The Garfield Gallery at Garfield School.

Zurla’s passion and talent for photography appeared later in life. He was in his early 40s during the late ‘60s and ‘70s when anti-war protests and the political landscape dominated headlines. Fascinated, he journeyed from New York City to Washington, D.C., where he started doing street photography.

“You’re in the middle of a crowd and smoke bombs are going off,” he said. “I was in my element. A friend was in the newspaper business and they gave me a press pass. I could go anywhere.”

Sharon Webster, his wife, remembers the darkroom Zurla built in his New York City apartment, the city where they met.

“Peter told me long ago he’s always had trouble expressing himself verbally,” she said, “but with photography he could express what he thought and felt.”

But then his photography habit came to a standstill. He put down the camera and didn’t pick it up for almost 50 years. Photos didn’t pay the bills. He had to work. And work he did, at all sorts of odd jobs in New York City and California. He was a hairstylist, a restaurant worker, a personal trainer, an employee at a mountaineering store. He and Webster moved to the Springs in 2002 because her mother was here.

Prostate cancer introduced a new wrinkle into his story. Afterward, his beat-up body could no longer do physical work, so he decided to buy a cheap camera. He wandered around the junkyard and by the railroad tracks, searching and finding interesting objects to capture. Turned out his keen eye for finding good photos was still intact, and his work made it into a few shows, including at Kreuser Gallery and in Pikes Peak Library District exhibits.

“I’m not doing it to make a living,” Zurla said. “I’m doing it because I like doing it and want others to see something I saw that maybe they didn’t see.”

And then came the pandemic, which really affected him psychologically and transformed his work, he says. It took a turn and grew darker, but he didn’t mind. In that darkness he felt creative. Not everyone loved it though. Friends who once enjoyed his photos told him they could no longer look at his work due to its darker nature.

“Before I would take it and hope someone would like it, but now I don’t care if you like it or not,” Zurla said. “It’s what I do. If I can create an emotion inside of you, like ‘oh, I hate it,’ I’ve done what I wanted to do. I had to get to the point where it’s my way of expressing myself.”

Contact the writer: 636-0270