Joseph Vavak 4/7/22 Joseph Vavak 4/7/22

Where the sky is wide and the clouds are few

I headed south as March turned to April, looking for photographs in West Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas to add to my ever-growing documentation of the Great Plains region. The project now has a title - West of Here - and I’ll be showing selections from it starting in July here in Omaha.

Now it’s time to start printing and framing…

Post title: Guy Clark - Fort Worth Blues

Joseph Vavak 1/9/22 Joseph Vavak 1/9/22

Saint Joe

More photographs of St. Joseph, Missouri from two days before the New Year.

St. Joe is one of those places that keeps drawing me back. There is so much history in this old Missouri River city, with a lot of largely untouched and un-gentrified areas. This suits me as a photographer, but I’m always saddened by how mistreated most of it is, and how all new development is focused on an expanding strip of sprawl to the east.

As William Least Heat-Moon wrote, “The future should grow from the past, not obliterate it.” And it shouldn’t just ignore the past until it vanishes in a pile of rubble, either.