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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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Saturday
Jan242009

For the first time since her injury, we take Margie out of the guest house and into D.C. (Inaugural still on hold)

DateSaturday, January 24, 2009 at 8:55PM

The process was complicated and I won't go into it, because it is 1:00 AM and I just want to go to bed, but today Lisa and I got Margie out of the guesthouse and into D.C. It took much longer than I had anticpated to get her ready, but when she was, her hair was clean and so were her clothes - no more hospital-blue paper pants. She looked nice.

We did a bunch of driving around and then wound up at the Muesum of the American Indian. We checked out a wheelchair and this fellow helped us get Margie into it.

As for the black and white, I am not trying to be artistic or to recall the good old days when I shot nothing but black and white film. I left my big cameras behind today and only took the pocket camera. I always keep it set to RAW, but somehow it had switched to JPEG with the color balance set to tungsten.

I tried and tried to come up with a suitable color balance and, had the images been RAW, it would have been no problem, even with the tungsten setting. But I could not do it, so I just made them black and white.

Well, the light inside the cafe of the Museum of the American Indian must have been tungsten.

They close the museum at 5:30 and by the time we finished eating, it was already after 5:00, so we didn't get to see much of it. I had thought we could go back tomorrow, but Margie says, no, it is too hard in the wheelchair. She does not want to do it again.

So it looks like we will just have to come back to Washington, D.C., another time. Maybe when the cherry blossoms bloom.

 

AuthorWasilla, Alaska, by 300 | Comment1 Comment |
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Reader Comments (1)

Dad~ I can't wait to see you when you finally return. I have to say the pic of mom getting in the wheel chair really shook me. Kalib looks forward to yr return, you have been missing some crazy Kalib moments.
~JfH

January 26, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterJaybop

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