Independence Day

This 4th of July finds me once again searching South Omaha for photographs. It's a fantastic day, not entirely too hot, and just enough clouds to make for good images. Everywhere I walked, the loud bang of a firework was never too far away and sometimes close enough to startle me. You never know how people will react to a strange bearded guy wandering around with a camera around his neck.

The project is slowly moving forward. I was happy with much of the last four rolls I got back from Dwayne's and have another three ready to go out in the mail. Above is a photograph of the back of some of the businesses along 24th Street.

At this point, I'm thinking I'd like to have a small show to reveal the work. It's been too long since I've exhibited anything.

More from this past weekend...

Coin, Iowa

Tarkio, Missouri

Farragut, Iowa

Detours make for good photographs

Fairfax, Missouri

A closed interstate detour is a bit of a peek at what life would be like if those two lane highways I like so much were all that we had to get from one place to another. In a word: crowded. Long waits at stop signs in little towns, people driving 20 miles an hour over the speed limit and making suicide passes around two or three cars at once.. It's safe that I'm glad that most of the highways I love so much are (usually) under-appreciated.

In my attempt to create my own detour, I stumbled across a few photogenic little towns in both Missouri and Iowa. The weather was also much more cooperative than yesterday. I had a much more productive day and now feel like I accomplished enough to make the trip worthwhile. This whole photography thing can be awfully frustrating sometimes.

One town that I passed through, Craig, had a sign proudly proclaiming that the town survived the 1993 floods. Unfortunately, it appears as if the town is on its way to needing to survive yet another one.

Craig, Missouri

Fremont County, Iowa

Also visited: Tarkio, Missouri. Riverton, Farragut and Sidney, Iowa.

Wanderin'

I set out today with out much of an aim and ended up in St. Joseph, Missouri. With all the flooding along the Missouri River, it's not exactly easy to get from Omaha to here. In fact, there isn't an open bridge across the river between Omaha and St. Joseph at the moment. Unfortunately, as I type this from a hotel room, there's a huge storm making its way through Omaha and southeast Nebraska into Iowa and Missouri. Rain is the last thing that the area needs at the moment.

It's only fitting that the weather didn't cooperate much at all today in a photographic sense. At first, everything was a uniform gray, but as the afternoon went on, the sun would appear and then disappear frequently. Without the sun illuminating the ground, the sky was much too bright to work with. And every time I tried to wait it out, the sun wouldn't peek through until I was back in the car and ready to move on.

The first photograph was taken just to the south of College Springs, Iowa. The second, of an old steel bridge over the swollen West Nishnabotna River, was taken between Malvern and Randolph, Iowa.

Also visited: Treynor, Silver City, Imogene, Shenandoah, Coin, Blanchard, Shambaugh and Braddyville, Iowa. Burlington Junction, Maryville, Bolckow, Rosendale, Rea, Whitesville, King City, Union Star, Helena, Rochester and Savannah, Missouri.

June

It's hard to believe June is already two-thirds over. Time has a way of really getting away from me.

I'm still at work photographing South Omaha. So far, it has been a bit of a struggle for me. The first camera had a wonky shutter and I keep forgetting to set the dial back to aperture priority on the second one. It's unbelievably frustrating to look down and suddenly realize you've shot half a roll of film at 1/60th of a second. Rather than admit defeat, I say a few impolite words in my head and go right back at it. I'm also finding the small area I've chosen to focus on to be more restrictive than I had imagined. In most cases, I just set out in the car and go for hours. This subject requires more thought and depth, more time spent walking and searching.

A few days ago, a friend asked me why I'm continuing to attempt something that I find to be so frustrating. I find that I need to work in a different way and develop new skills, no matter how much I want to go back to what I know best. It's the only way I can get better and evolve as an artist. So I press on.

I am sending four rolls of film off to Dwayne's in Parsons, Kansas tomorrow. New photographs soon, U.S. Mail and old Minolta camera willing.

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Also, don't forget that I'm posting three images of Nebraska to my Flickr account every day this month. I've enjoyed going back through all the images from ninety-three for what feels like the thousandth time. There's always something new to be found...

www.flickr.com/photos/josephvavak

Including the photograph of the sandhills and sky of Arthur County, Nebraska that is now on the front page of my website.

www.josephvavak.com

The other half...

I recently began posting photographs on a Flickr page, hoping to reach new people and join a wider community of photographers. I will be updating the page on a regular basis, so stop by periodically and see what's going on. There is a new Untitled series already posted that hasn't appeared on my website yet.

Over the next month, I will be displaying a second set of images of Nebraska. Entitled ninety-three and a half, the series features another 93 images that didn't make the cut for the finished product. I love many of these photographs as much as anything I've ever done, and I discovered many new images I hadn't given a second thought since the early days of my travels. There will be three photographs posted (most) every day in the month of June.

Without further adieu..

www.flickr.com/photos/josephvavak

Sunday details

Both images are from Council Bluffs, Iowa.

Happy (?) accidents

The aforementioned shutter problems lead to some interesting results. While I like the spontaneity of some of the mistakes, as illustrated above, I'm sending the camera in for repairs. I think I would get more and more frustrated as I saw more otherwise good photographs ruined.

South O

It took a little longer than I had expected, but the first two rolls of film of images from South Omaha are back from a photo lab in Texas. The good news is that the ol' Minolta works well for the most part, although the shutter appears to lag occasionally. Working from film scans will take some getting used to, but I like the results thus far.

For now, enjoy a few images from Sunday afternoon, May 8th.

ninety-three

Matej Vavak came to Nebraska in 1868 with his wife and five children, settling on a homestead in the hills of Saunders County near what would become the Czech village of Prague. The family first built a log cabin, then a house, and farmed the land for many years. Upon his death, Matej was buried with his wife in a small cemetery in the fields of the property, marked with a large stone carved in his native Bohemian language.

I didn’t come to Nebraska until 1995, the summer before my junior year of high school. My father grew up in Prague and my mother in east-central Iowa, but I was born in Indiana after they were married. By the time I became interested in art and photography, I had lived in Nebraska for roughly half of my life, much longer than my family had stayed in any one place while I was growing up. I realized that I only knew a very small portion of the state I called home and decided to embark on a photo project designed to change that.

On a warm June day in 2007, I began my exploration at the grave of Matej Vavak, still standing in the midst of a field of newly planted soy beans. It seemed like a fitting place to begin the journey. That first day, I crossed the Platte River at North Bend and drove US Highway 30 west to Grand Island.

ninety-three developed over the course of a few road trips to every corner of the state. At first, I didn't really know exactly what it was I was looking for. This was the best possible way I could have approached something like this. Without a concrete plan, I was able to let Nebraska dictate how the project would look and influence the way my photography was developing. I found out a lot about myself in the landscape, from the isolation of a single lane of asphalt through the sandhills to the tremendous sound of a short grass prairie moving in the wind. Even though the project is now finished, I find myself with a strong need to revisit these places, to continue exploring Nebraska.

In the end, the series consists of one photograph for every one of the state’s 93 counties. It’s an unusual portrait of the state I call home, a visual document recording all the details that I encountered along the way. I hope that people enjoy the photographs and find themselves inspired to get to know Nebraska a little better.

Selections from ninety-three were exhibited at Hot Shops Art Center in Omaha during May of 2010. I hope to show the entire series at some point and publish a book of the photographs.

A map of everywhere I visited during the making of ninety-three.

A new beginning...

It was almost a year ago that I found myself happily unemployed and toyed with creating a document of the South Omaha I had come to love since moving to this part of town. After a somewhat feeble attempt at starting the project, I put it on the back burner and continued to put a bit of polish on ninety-three instead. Today, I spent the afternoon photographing South Omaha once again, restarting what I hope will hold my attention and bring inspiration to me.

I have decided to shoot color film for the first time in a few years. Pictured above is the Minolta XD-5 SLR that I purchased a few weeks ago along with 35mm and 50mm lenses. It was manufactured in 1979, the same year I was born. The hope is that the older camera will seem less conspicuous than an all black, modern DSLR and people will be a little more comfortable around it.

As I worked with the Minolta today, I remembered why I like these simple manual focus cameras so much. The viewfinder is tremendous, the subject snaps in and out of focus smoothly as I turn the lens' focusing ring. It's a bit like driving a car with a manual transmission. The operator feels more connected with the machine, more involved in the process of taking a photograph. The XD-5 doesn't have all the bells and whistles, but it feels solid and the lenses are wonderfully small and well-built.

After shooting with digital for so long, I found returning to film to be a bit of an adjustment. There's no confirmation as to whether you got everything right or if something went horribly wrong. Thirty-six exposures seems both small and large at the same time. The last frame can come up right in the middle of a burst of creativity. Or it waits off in the distance, taunting you to find enough potential subjects to finish the roll. I can't decide what is worse, wasting the last few frames or leaving a half-shot roll in the camera, anxious to see what magic you captured, unable to develop the film until it reaches its end.

Cross your fingers for me. I'll (hopefully) have some images later this week, thirty-year old camera permitting.

For the photo nerds in the audience who care about such things, I'm trying out Kodak's Ektar 100 film. It's supposed to be as close to transparency film as print film gets, with the least grain of any color film. This is actually the first time I've ever shot Kodak color film. All of my older projects were shot with the now defunct Fujifilm NPS 160 film.

A spring afternoon

May has snuck up on Nebraska, ushering in green grass and mighty thunderstorms, giving us all a chance to enjoy the fleeting days of spring. After my morning class, I was compelled by the towering clouds to stare at (and attempt to photograph) the afternoon sky in awe. In the end, I spent most of my time waiting for the sun to find its way out from between the clouds, watching the water of Lake Manawa with the retired old men who sit for hours alone staring at their fishing lines.

I sat on the banks of the Missouri for a time, just myself and the swirling motions of its current going by. The result of that activity is included above. It's a series of photographs of the same spot in the river, taken a few seconds apart.

Happy Cinco de Mayo, everyone.