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A blog by Bill Hess

Running Dog Publications

P.O. Box 872383 Wasilla, Alaska 99687

 

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Wasilla

Wasilla is the place where I have lived for the past 29 years - sort of. The house in which my wife and I raised our family sits here, but I have made my rather odd career as a different sort of photojournalist by continually wandering off to other places to photograph people and gather information, which I have then put together in various publications that have served the Alaska Native Eskimo, Indian and Aleut communities.

Although I did not have a great of free time to devote to this rather strange community, named after a Tanaina Athabascan Indian chief who knew Wasilla in the way that I so impossibly long to, I have still documented it regularly over the past quarter-century plus. In the early days, my Wasilla photographs focused mostly upon my children and the events they participated in - baseball, football, figure skating, hockey, frog catching, fire cracker detonation, Fourth of July parade - that sort of thing. 

In 2002, I purchased my first digital camera and then, whenever I was home, I began to photograph Wasilla upon a daily basis, but not in a conventional way. These were grab shots - whatever caught my eye as I took my many long walks or drove through the town, shooting through the car window at people and scenes that appeared and disappeared before I could even focus and compose in the traditional photographic way.

Thus, the Wasilla portion of this blog will be devoted both to the images that I take as I wander about and those that I have taken in the past. Despite the odd, random, nature of the images, I believe they communicate something powerful about this town that I have never seen expressed anywhere else. 

Wasilla is a sprawling community that has been slapped down hodge-podge upon what was so recently wilderness of the most exquisite beauty. In its design, it is deliberately anti-zoned, anti-planned. In the building of Wasilla, the desire to make a buck has trumped aesthetics and all other considerations. This town, built in the midst of exquisite beauty, has largely become an unsightly, unattractive, mess of urban sprawl. Largely because of this, it often seems to me that Wasilla is a community with no sense of community, a town devoid of town soul.

Yet - Wasilla is my home and if I am lucky it will be until I grow old and die. Despite its horrific failings, it is still made of the stuff of any small city: people; moms and dads, grammas and grampas, teens, children, churches, bars, professionals, laborers, soldiers, missionaries, artists, athletes, geniuses, do-gooders, hoodlums, the wealthy, the homeless, the rational and logical, the slightly insane and the wholly insane - and, yes, as is now obvious to the whole world, politicians, too.

So perhaps, if one were to search hard enough, it might just be possible to find a sense of community here, and a town soul. So, using my skills as a photojournalist and a writer, I hope to do just that. If this place has a sense of community, I will find it. If there is a town soul to Wasilla, I will document it. I won't compete with the newspapers. Hell no! But as time and income allow, it will be fun to wander into the places where the folks described above gather, and then put what I find on this blog.

 

by 300...

Anywhere within a 300 mile radius of Wasilla. This encompasses perhaps the most wild, dramatic, gorgeous, beautiful section of land and sea to be found in any comparable space anywhere on Earth. I can never explore it all, but I will do the best that I can, and will here share what I find and experience with you.  

and then some...

Anywhere else in the world that I happen to get to, such as Point Lay, Alaska; Missoula, Montana; Serenki, Chukotka, Russia; or Bangalore, India. Perhaps even Lagos, Nigeria. I have both a desire and scheme to get me there. It is a long shot. We shall see if I succeed.

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Sunday
Nov232008

Wasilla vs, Barrow; home team vs. home team

DateSunday, November 23, 2008 at 11:46PM


So there I was in Fairbanks, trying to photograph six middle school teams from the Arctic Slope as they battled their way through the Challenge Life tournament. It was crazy, because the tournament was organized so that three games were always being played simultaneously and whenever one of the teams that I needed to photograph was playing on one court, at least one more was playing somewhere else.

Sometimes three played at once - in three different games - and I needed to photograph them all!

I would do a quarter here, a quarter there, then run back here...

In one of the quarters, Barrow's Hopson Middle School Lady Wolves battled the Wasilla Warriors.

Three of my children were Warriors. Whenever I go to Barrow, everywhere I go, people say, "welcome home." I know the people of Barrow much better than I do those of Wasilla. I feel a sense of community when I am in Barrow that I do not feel in Wasilla, but I am completely comfortable in my Wasilla house, with my Wasilla family. In fact, in all the world, my Wasilla house is the most comfortable place I can be - but isolated from the community.

So who was I supposed to root for?

Wasilla (red) won the game and moved on to the championship playoffs. Dajonnae Harris is the Wasilla girl. I know her name only because she stayed in the same hotel as me and was standing directly in front of me this morning in the continental breakfast waffle line. By the time I complete my project, I will know the name of the Barrow girl, but right now I do not.

I shot many pictures and have not yet had time to even glance at them, but I wanted to run a frame from the Wasilla vs Barrow game, so I grabbed one from there real quick. 

Maybe I will run a few more pix from the tourney on this blog, maybe I won't. I won't do a thorough edit of them until sometime in December, but maybe I will grab a couple more at random and put them in here tomorrow, or perhaps the next day.

Maybe I won't. Depends on if I can find the time.

 

AuthorWasilla, Alaska, by 300 | Comment2 Comments |
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Reader Comments (2)

love the blog, well done for nice photos, and i agree noise is not a barrier to recording great every day events.
i live in in london

November 28, 2008 | Unregistered Commentergreguk

love the blog, well done for nice photos, and i agree noise is not a barrier to recording great every day events.
i live in in london

November 28, 2008 | Unregistered Commentergreguk

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