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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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Entries in Chevak Dancers (1)

Friday
Oct232009

My plans for tonight are derailed by a thundering headache, but here, at least, is a bit of Cup'ik beauty, grace and power from the AFN Convention

DateFriday, October 23, 2009 at 4:01AM

I had big plans for this blog tonight, but it is late, I am too tired and I have a thundering headache. I cannot even begin to edit and process the bulk of today's take. I arrived at the Alaska Federation of Natives Convention a little before noon and then spent the rest of the day until about 9:00 PM either there or at related functions.

I did interview a handful of people, but mostly I just walked around and bumped into old friends and chatted. And I never had to walk very far. In fact, it was kind of impossible to walk far, because if you have wandered around Alaska for as long as I have and you go to AFN, then you just run into friend upon friend upon friend and each time you stop and chat.

So, besides the interviews, that's pretty much what I did. And I took a number of photos of some of these folks and so I was going to run a series of such pictures, but man, I've got to take some aspirin and go to bed!

So instead, I am doing it easy tonight. The last event that I attended was the first part of the performance of the Chevak Dancers, by which time my counter said I only had 36 frames left in my camera. You always get two or three more pictures than the counter says you will, plus I threw about dozen away so I could shoot just a few more, but still I wound up with only about 30 frames in my editor. It is easy to grab six of 30 frames, whereas it would be quite hard and time-consuming for me to try to sort through all these other shots and process them.

So here is one of the three: a beautiful dancer, whose name I do not know, waiting for her drummers to sing.

Her drummers sing.

She dances.

He dances, as well.

View from the front.

John Pingayak, leader of the Chevak Dance group, speaks to the crowd.

 

I have some more interviews to do tomorrow and I will also spend more time wandering about the convention, which means that I will have even that many more photos of friends to try to make some kind of presentation out of. I will also explain more about what the AFN convention is.

But I will do it. I sure hope that I can get rid of this headache, first. It is really a terrible headache. I don't know how a person can even think when he has a headache like this.

Chevak, by the way, is a Cup'ik village in Southwest Alaska, about ten miles inland from Hooper Bay on the Bering Sea coast. I have landed there a couple of times when I was doing work in Hooper Bay, but I have done no work in Chevak. Maybe one day I yet will.

There singers are strong. Their dances beautiful, graceful and powerful. So I think the village must be all these things as well.

AuthorWasilla, Alaska, by 300 | Comment8 Comments |
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