The State of the Artist: 2013

 01/01/13 #9 (Burt County)

As yet another begins, I feel ever more confident about the direction I've been moving as a photographer. While much work remains, especially in regards to the exhibition of my photography, I have reached a level of competency in my image-making that surprises me on a regular basis. I remember spending hours circling large pieces of Nebraska searching for a single photograph during my travels for ninety-three, struggling to come up with anything that would work. Now I find myself working in small areas with far more success and feel increasingly connected with the environment that surrounds me.

2012 was an important year in my life, both personal and artistic. In my personal life, I found love and a sense of contentment that has brought new meaning to my day-to-day existence. This inspiration and stability will guide my work moving forward and give me the courage to take more chances rather than continue to drift through time without embracing it.

from Fontenelle

Artistically, I began two large-scale projects and exhibited another during the year. Fontenelle was not begun until later in the year but has become somewhat of an obsession for me since then. This series marks several changes from what I have been working with since my first serious work in 2006. I'm not working via a road trip, instead spending many hours simply walking through Nebraska's Fontenelle Forest. This lends a very intimate feel to the work, a documentation of these walks and the details of a quite small piece of this world. The photographs are also black and white, something I haven't done since my time at school. I have wanted to work in black and white again for quite some time but had not found the right project until now. Fontenelle should be finished by the summer.

from the Platte River series

2012 also marked the (early, early) beginnings of a study of the Platte River from its beginnings in the mountains of Colorado and Wyoming to its confluence with the Missouri River near Plattsmouth, Nebraska. I have been researching this project every now and then since 2009 but did not set out to start on it until July of this year. It's still too early to see what direction this work will ultimately take or how long it will be until I see fit to call it finished.

The Magic City at Hot Shops

In May, I exhibited The Magic City at the Hot Shops Art Center in Omaha along with the work of William Hess. While I love the images from the series, I am still a bit unsure about the quality of the prints that were created from the film scans. That aside, the photographs looked quite good together on display and I received many compliments over the course of the month. To anyone who visited the Hot Shops and is reading this entry: Thank you so very much for your support.

2013 begins, much as 2012, with a series of thirteen photographs taken on New Year's Day. One of these images leads this blog entry. The others will be posted to my Flickr page over the next two weeks. As I did last year, I will be posting an image to Flickr every weekday. This has proven to be great motivation to get out and shoot as much possible, a requirement if I want to publish 250 or so good (or better) images over the course of a year.

I will do my best to update this blog a little more regularly with what's going on. I also regret that the ninety-three book has not yet seen the light of day. At some point, I lost the files I had made for the test printing of the book and life has kept me from getting back to it. I will do my best to remedy this delay soon.

Here's to another year of growth and discoveries. Let's make the most of it.

The State of the Artist: 2012

Now that 2012 has begun, I thought it would be a good time to talk a little bit about my photographic pursuits and what I have planned for the near future. I now find myself nearing the completion of my bachelor's degree and, with it, the completion of another chapter of my life. What follows are a few plans and insights about my place in this crazy world, camera in hand..

This May marks five years since I first set out to photograph Nebraska for what would become ninety-three. I've developed three goals for the series, one of which I achieved with my first exhibition at Hot Shops in 2010. Next is the publication of all 93 photographs as a photo book. I received the first copy of the book this week and will be finalizing all the little details in the next month or so.

Photo books have been a big influence for me as a photographer. I started with Robert Frank's The Americans and moved from there, finding tremendous amounts of inspiration from image after image displayed in this very intimate artform. Paging through my first attempt, I felt an immense pride in the work, a feeling that I had in many ways lost after sifting through the photographs for so many years. I'm very excited for others to get a chance to see the whole series in this format.

My South Omaha photographs will be titled The Magic City, a nickname that the city earned in the 19th century due to its remarkable rise in population almost overnight. While I'm not sure the project is too near completion at this point, I will be showing many of the images at the Hot Shops Art Center in a small two person show with my friend and photographer William Hess. Our photographs will be on display throughout May with an opening at the Hot Shops' Spring Open House on May 5th and 6th.

The Magic City is similar in a lot of ways to my prior work, a collection of details and random color photographs taken throughout South Omaha. I do feel, however, that the work is different in other ways from what I've done before, building on that foundation and expanding further. This growth is what keeps me growing and coming back to the camera again and again.

The future is still very much in the air. I'm researching a few large projects and hope to have something settled on in the coming months. As I've found before, the best laid plans often are the least productive while the results of happenstance are far more successful. I look forward to stumbling into another subject that consumes me as much as ninety-three has.

For the time being, I'll keep taking other photographs that will be published on my Flickr page, so check back often.

Thank you for your support. 

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.

An anniversary

Downtown Omaha, from 16th and Jackson.

The First National Tower under construction.

Today marks the tenth anniversary of the first day I picked up a camera and attempted to make photographs in an artistic sort of way. It was a fairly warm Easter Sunday and I was living in an apartment in downtown Omaha. I remember a homeless man preaching to me about Jesus as I walked down Jackson Street. And it was the day that Joey Ramone passed away.

I had just purchased a Sony digital camera on a whim. To be honest, I don't really remember why I felt I needed to spend $350 on something I really didn't have much use for at the time. It had a 1.3 megapixel sensor and the 64 mb (!) memory stick I purchased to go with the camera cost $130. Most of the photographs from those first few months are taken at awkward angles, something I must have felt gave the images a more authentically artistic bent. Most were taken in the camera's black and white mode, another important aspect of overly artsy photographs.

In those days, I was completely up in the air about where my life was headed. My first serious relationship had ended a year before and I was just about to go back to college in pursuit of a psychology degree. I ran a fairly popular punk music website and had vague dreams of starting a record label or opening a club. But, like most of the people I knew at the time, I just was sort of hanging around, hoping something would catch my eye.

Somehow, photography clicked with me. It was still quite some time before I found myself and really became interested in art, but the foundation was there early on. Ten years later, I feel like I'm still learning and improving, and I've actually gotten to the point where I can refer to myself as an artist with a straight face. I look forward to a lifetime of possibilities.

Below are a few more photographs from those first few months.

Boys Town

Gateway Arch. St. Louis, Missouri.

Downtown. Prague, Nebraska

Boys Town

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.

About the author

Welcome to my latest endeavor, a blog that will undoubtedly lay neglected far more than it is maintained. This is far from my first foray into web authorship, although it has been over two years since I worked on the website of my last project, the music-centric somedaynever. That experience defined me for over five years and lead to many accomplishments that I'm very proud of and quite a few disappointments that I have learned from. The last sdn event was in January of 2007, a rock show at a local dive bar that was a fitting end to a pretty good era for me.

As my interest in somedaynever waned, I found myself with the time to really delve into photography. While most art-minded people grow up with a creative mindset, most of my time in high school and my first two semesters at college (before inevitably dropping out) was spent on math and science classes. It wasn't until I was 23 that I picked up a camera artistically for the first time. By the time 2007 rolled around, I had completed most all of the commercial photography curriculum at Metropolitan Community College here in Elkhorn and found myself looking for a direction to focus all of my creative ideas and energy on.

Pushed by the writings of Jack Kerouac and photographers like Stephen Shore and Robert Frank, along with some coaxing from some very good friends, I hit the road and began to explore this country. The first revelation came in Glacier National Park, on the shore of Avalanche Lake in mid-May. There was this quiet beauty there, this isolation, that I hadn't considered to be important in my life or photography before.

A month after the Montana trip, I began a project that I envisioned for quite some time but found myself ill-prepared to really go out and create. After a few day trips to explore Nebraska, the idea evolved into a collection of ninety-three images, one for every county in the state. 8,000 miles later, I am nearing completion of the project and hope to self-publish a book in the coming months. The photographs that make up ninety-three are not meant to symbolize each part of this state, but stand as more of a collection of memories and places that I came across over the course of my travels. Some are beautiful, some may be humorous, but all are a snapshot of this place at this time as seen by this curious observer. Nebraska is as much a part of me as I am of it, and I've enjoyed nearly every moment spent exploring its smallest corners and widest spaces.

2008 finds me trying to balance what I need to do with what I want to do, attempting to find a way to continue my travels, move closer to finishing a bachelor's degree and exist in a world where art photography doesn't necessarily pay the bills. This web log will (hopefully) record my photo-related adventures in the coming months along with my thoughts and insights into all other things photographic.