Now available: New prints for sale bi-monthly along with a new book - Hardscrabble - of black and white photographs from 2010-2016. Click here to learn more and add to your collection.


Welcome to my home on the internet. I am a photographer from Omaha, Nebraska that has been photographing the surrounding region for more than fifteen years. For the last few years, much of my work has been focused on two main themes: a sense of place and the impermanence of rural life on the Great Plains.

My interest in the idea of place reaches back to my childhood, listening to my grandfather talk about all of the Iowa towns along U.S. Highway 6 in its heyday, places with names that I still know by heart: Marengo, Ladora, Victor, Brooklyn, Malcolm. My photographs are inspired by this life-long love of the road along with the work of artists that are inspired by a sense of place: William Christenberry, Lucinda Williams, David Plowden, Kent Haruf, John K. Samson.

Recently while photographing what's left of downtown Concord, Nebraska, an older gentleman stopped his pickup truck to ask exactly what the hell it is that I was up to. I told him I take pictures of anything that might not be around if I return in five or ten years. He nodded his head and drove on. This is the other focus of my photographs. All of these places and buildings, no matter their current state, meant everything to someone. They were homes and businesses, towns that once prospered for decades, now left to slowly disappear as time marches on. In just the decade-plus I have been photographing Nebraska, there are countless photographs that I simply could not make again. 

All images and content © Joseph Vavak 2005-2024.