On the way home

Back to Omaha once again after a quick trip up the summit road at Scotts Bluff National Monument. It was a great experience despite the overly gray day that present itself. The view was great, as was the drive up the winding road to the top.

ninety-three is a mere photo or two away from being completely finalized. We're just about a month and a half away from the Hot Shops show.

The above photo is from the scenic overlook at Scotts Bluff National Monument. The line across the middle is the walking path to the summit.

A Sea of Sand (Hills)

I'm fairly certain that the best drive in the state of Nebraska is state highway 27 between Gordon and Ellsworth. Fifty-five miles of winding road, rising and falling through the near-absolute isolation of the sand hills. Just make sure to fill your tank beforehand; There's about 90 miles between gas stations.

The above photograph is from downtown Bayard in the shadow (figuratively) of Chimney Rock.

Also visited: Alliance, Hay Springs, Rushville, Lakeside, Antioch and McGrew.

Westward!

It's been too long since my last visit to Nebraska's panhandle. I missed most everything about the place. Sometimes its easy to forget that a person is in Nebraska when driving through this part of the state.

The day started off in McCook, looking to improve my image for Red Willow county after a couple of earlier attempts left a little to be desired. After a morning of dreary gray clouds, the sun finally broke through and made for a beautiful early spring day. It is definitely nice to leave the long-standing piles of snow behind in Omaha.

The above image is of the main street in Danbury. The village of 128 people lies just a few miles north of the Kansas border southeast of McCook.

Also visited: Marion, Hayes Center, Wallace, Broadwater, Bridgeport and Harrisburg.

Spring print sale!

To celebrate the completion of the ninety-three project and my first solo exhibition, I'm offering a special discounted print sale to everyone I am lucky enough to have the support of here in the early going. Any image from the ninety-three, on the road, or details sections of my website are available.

All prints will be 15x10" c-prints on 20x16" paper matted with an archival mat and backing board. Each will be hand-numbered and signed by the artist. The prints will only be produced in limited amounts. I haven't chosen the editions yet, but expect to only produce 15-25 of each image for sale.

The pre-exhibition price is no longer available. Enjoy the show.

To purchase a photograph, send me an email at josephvavak@gmail.com or contact me via my facebook fan page.


As always, your support is greatly appreciated. All of the funds will go into making the Hot Shops show a successful debut. I'm very excited to get this show on the road.

Images Of Nebraska

I stumbled across this book a few weeks ago on Amazon and ordered a copy out of curiosity. Nebraska Photographic Documentary Project 1975-1977 was published by the University Of Nebraska Press in conjunction with the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery.


The book is best described by its rather wordy title. Two photographers, Robert Starck and Lynn Dance, documented the state of Nebraska in the spirit of photographers like Walker Evans. Their black and white photographs are very straight-forward, a collection of places and people that they encountered throughout the state over the course of the project.

As a whole, the Photographic Documentary Project is an interesting look at the state of Nebraska nearly three and a half decades ago. Many of the photographs may be unremarkable, but that's the nature of this kind of work. I was happy to see a project somewhat similar to my own in print and enjoyed comparing my work with that of these two photographers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the images in this collection feel as if they could have been taken just yesterday. As much as parts of Omaha and Lincoln continue to rapidly change and expand, much of the state stays remarkably the same.




I attempted to google both Starck and Dance without much success. If anyone stumbles across this blog that knows more about this book or the photographers behind it, please drop me a line at josephvavak at g mail dot com. I'm curious to know if they continued to produce photographs after finishing this project.

Revisited (Again)

Today was a great day to get out and photograph, the first such day off I've had in quite awhile. There is still a lot of snow on the ground. Along with the gray skies, it really makes the whole countryside seem incredibly bleak and lonesome.

I rephotographed a few places that have now become very familiar, just trying to get exactly what I want while the snow is still around and the mood is right. The image above is one I've taken before but had never quite been happy with. It's a farmstead along old Linwood Road, halfway between Morse Bluff and Linwood in northwest Saunders County.

Three months...

The Hot Shops show is just a little more than three months from now. Everything is coming together nicely thanks to the help of William Hess. I am not sure if I'm more excited for everyone to see the work or to see how it's going to look on display.

I will be offering a print sale in the next few weeks to help pay for the exhibition. The prints will be available at a lower price for a limited time. I'll have more details soon.

Don't forget to become a fan on Facebook. And put Friday night, April 30th on your calendars.

January

Omaha is (was?) starting to thaw out after a rough month or so of consecutive blizzards. There were two snowfalls of over a foot along with numerous smaller storms along with temperatures that bottomed out around fifteen below zero. My day job finds me in the business of selling snow throwers. After five weeks of nonstop phone calls and emergency shipments of product, everything is finally settling down and things are getting back to normal. All in all, they say it may be the worst winter in 60 years. And, unfortunately, it's not over yet.

Above is a photograph of the ten plus foot snow pile that has become a (semi-)permanent resident of our cul-de-sac.

This is a biography...

I (Joseph Vavak) am a photographer from Omaha, Nebraska that has a somewhat puzzling obsession with the mundane and the everyday. My photography is the result of what happens when someone cursed with a photographic memory and the mind of an engineer becomes wrapped up in the freedom of creating something unique to his existence.

2010 marks the completion and unveiling of ninety-three, a photographic record of the state of Nebraska. ninety-three features one photograph for every one of Nebraska's counties, the result of countless miles spent wandering my home state. It is a random collection of memories and places unlike most any portrait of Nebraska that you might have seen. ninety-three is about getting to know exactly where it is I come from and recording everything that I encountered along the way.

ninety-three will be on display at the Hot Shops Art Center in Omaha, Nebraska in May of 2010. The show will be opening during the Hot Shops' spring open house weekend.



Exhibitions
May 2006
Corning Center For The Fine Arts in Corning, Iowa
Miniseries

October 2006
W. Dale Clark Library in Omaha, Nebraska
One MWPSE Student Exhibition

November 2006
Hillmer Art Gallery in Omaha, Nebraska
Artist and Mentor Show

April 2007
The Art Of Music in Nebraska City, Nebraska
inexterior

January 2008
Hot Shops Art Center in Omaha, Nebraska
Miniseries 2.0

May 2010
Hot Shops Art Center in Omaha, Nebraska
selections from ninety-three

May 2012
Hot Shops Art Center in Omaha, Nebraska
selections from The Magic City


For references, inquiries or any other questions that you might have, please contact me at josephvavak at gmail.com.

The Oxford Project

One idea I have been saving for a rainy day, perhaps for a thesis project, is to photograph every person in a small town. And, as seems to happen with many ideas, someone has already beat me to it.

Peter Feldstein's The Oxford Project features photographs of most everyone in the small town of Oxford, Iowa. Oxford is just northwest of Iowa City and currently has around 700 residents. I've got a handful of family members buried in the town cemetery, none of which appear in this book.

Feldstein takes the idea one step further, photographing the town residents twice, once in 1984 and again in 2006. Along with the pairs of photographs, the residents were asked to describe how their life had changed in the twenty-two years since they were originally photographed.

The result is a fascinating book about the identity and growth of a small town. We see some of what has changed and what has stayed the same. Some residents talk proudly about the smallest details of their lives. Others confess to how the small town atmosphere has been suffocating. But most all seem proud to be Oxford residents, for better or worse. It's especially interesting to see how people have changed over the course of two decades and how many of the children have chosen to stay and make the town their home as adults.

A small sampling of The Oxford Project is available online at this website. The book is currently available from Welcome Books.

Five: Photo books from 2009...

I didn't buy enough photo books this year to author a 'best of' list, but here are five books that I really enjoyed this past year.


William Eggleston
Paris
While Paris is unlikely to change anyone's opinion on the photography of William Eggleston, it's a solid book for anyone who may already be a fan. Along with the images, there are a few of Eggleston's drawings interspersed in the book.







Edward Hopper & Company
This book basically takes what might be my favorite painter's work and discusses his influence on some of my favorite photographers. It's a fantastic little book but sadly already out of print and demanding high prices.









Jungjin Lee
Wind
Released late in the year by Aperture, this book has served as my introduction to Lee's beautiful work. Wind features atypical, intriguing landscape photographs produced on homemade paper hand coated with a homemade emulsion.







Sarah Greenough
Looking In: The Americans
This is by far the most obsessive photobook of the year. Greenough's look at The Americans is several times larger than the book it analyzes. The highlight of the expanded edition is a look at Frank's contact sheets for the project.







Peter Kayafas
O Public Road!
Peter Kayafas' collection of American road-trip photographs has a title I wish I had thought of first. And the book comes with a song by Eef Barzelay of Clem Snide fame, bringing music and photography together in an effective way. A great concept.

Image: Meadville, Keya Paha County

When I set out to construct my first project on Nebraska, I decided that I wanted to create a sort of visual collection of all the random places I visited throughout the state. The idea was to explore this place I call home and record images of its smallest corners that may otherwise have been forgotten or left in anonymity.

The Omaha World-Herald has an article today about a new bridge being constructed across the Niobrara River in north-central Nebraska. I visited the old bridge during the summer of 2007 and captured the above photograph which will appear in the final edit of the series.

Meadville is what amounts to a ghost town on a rarely-traveled gravel road that wanders over 30 miles between Springview and Ainsworth. All that remained there was a general store and this old, one lane bridge. At the time, I wondered just how safe the wood-surfaced bridge really was.

Not safe enough, it seems.