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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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Friday
Apr092010

My 911 site post briefly (hopefully) on hold, due to nightmarish Squarespace manlfunctions

DateFriday, April 9, 2010 at 11:58AM

This Squarespace..... AAAAAUUUUGH..... After spending well over an hour editing and preparing the 17 photos for my planned 911 site visit post, I have had to give up on putting that post up for now. This is because I have been working on uploading the photos for half-an-hour and have gotten nowhere, because, at it so often does, this quirky, awful, worst-piece-of-software-that-I-have-ever-dealt-with is acting up and making it, if not altogether impossible, horribly time-consuming to get even one image incorrectly uploaded.

I can't take the fight and delay any longer and so I am going to leave this post for now, come back in a few hours and see if Squarespace is behaving a little better. It won't be behaving well because, when it comes to dealing with photographs, even when Squarespace runs just as designed it is still a time-consuming, burdensome, wasteful, program that is five-times as slow and tedious as Blogger (I have timed it). But if it improves from what it is doing now to operating just five times as slow as blogger, I can still get the post up.

I have to get out of Squarespace and find a bloghost that is actually committed to to solving its problems and making itself a smooth running, efficient program, attuned to the needs of its customers - I have to, I have to, I have to.

As I have said before, it will not be an easy thing and it will take a couple of months and will lose me so many links and such that I have built up, but I have to go - if I am too make anything of this blog I must find a host that does not require me to spend two-thirds of my time fighting its quirks and inefficiences.

Anyway, I will get the 911 site visit post up as soon as is feasible.

 

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

Hey, Bill...My site is hosted on SiteGround, and they do a good enough job. I use a WordPress platform on the server and Microsoft LiveWriter as my blogging writing program. LiveWriter runs on your local computer, and then when you're done, you hit "publish", and it will upload all your pictures along with the blog post...For what it's worth! I set it all up myself, so I don't know how well they do at setting it up for you, but I've been with them for three (?) years now and have had no issues. If you do decide to use SiteGround, reference me, so I can get a few months' credit for my site! ;-) But if you don't, that's okay--just know that there are plenty of good site hosts out there and you're not tied down to Squarespace.

April 9, 2010 | Unregistered CommenterOmegaMom

Thanks, OmegaMom. I will include SiteGround among the platforms I explore.

April 9, 2010 | Registered CommenterWasilla, Alaska, by 300

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