My parents met during WWII and were married in England just before the Allied invasion of Normandy on D-Day.  My father, Sylvester Vavruska landed at Omaha Beach as a forward observer with the 5th Ranger Battalion.  He was an Army artilleryman and later a carpenter and building contractor, and was the son of Czech immigrants.  My mother, Allene Smith, a US Army evacuation hospital nurse during the war, was of Scots-Irish and English descent and raised in the mountains of western North Carolina.  After the war, my parents settled on the west side of Chicago where my father had grown up.  I was born in suburban Oak Park.  Growing up in Illinois, my early interests included baseball, butterfly and stamp collecting, the work of Mark Twain, the Civil War, trains, geography, and chemistry.

It was during family trips to western North Carolina to visit my grandparents that I discovered the entire world had not been converted to  suburbia:  there were large, undeveloped forests and…mountains!  Our family made the move to the Southern Appalachians in 1964, to be closer to my mother’s side of the family.  I soon developed a keen interest in mountains, thanks mostly to my grandfather, John B. Smith.  As we would ride around in his pickup truck, he would point out different mountains by name – “…John, that’s Plott Balsam, and over that way, there’s Steestachee Bald”.  I learned to recognize those mountains from all sides, like one would a human figure.

My interest in science and math led me to major in chemical engineering at North Carolina State University.  A few days after graduating in the spring of 1973, I backpacked with three friends through the Great Smoky Mountains along the 71 miles of the Appalachian Trail inside the park.  Our gear was inadequate for the cold that dipped into the low teens in May that year.  At the end of our trek at Davenport Gap, I tossed my cheap,  cotton pile sleeping bag into a trash can, freeing me from the temptation to ever use it again.  Despite those hardships, I knew I would be a backpacker and hoped that one day I would have an opportunity to be a mountaineer.  I had no camera on that adventure but my memories of moving on foot through those mountains remained vivid.

My first real excitement with photography began later that year with a book I gave my mother for her birthday, Appalachian Wilderness: The Great Smoky Mountains, by Edward Abbey with color photographs by Eliot Porter.  Thinking back, I hope my mother had a chance to read or at least look at her gift, because I remember poring over the book.  I looked at Porter’s photographs over and over again and was moved by how they portrayed in great detail and at all scales, the only mountains I knew at that time.

I landed my first job as a research engineer at the Idaho National Lab in Idaho Falls.  For someone who really liked mountains, this seemed like a much better geographic choice than New Jersey’s industrial corridor or the Gulf Coast.  I now had a 35mm Nikkormat camera and carried it on weekend backpacks into the White Clouds, Big Losts, Wind Rivers, Tetons, and Yellowstone.  I made my first black and white prints with a friend who had a few trays and an enlarger; we developed 8x10s in his bathtub.  Seeing that first image come up in the developer was a magical experience and I was hooked.  I checked out all the photography books the local library had.  I liked the work of many photographers with widely varying subject matter, styles, and visions.  But the photographers whose work inspired me the most were all masters of the “West Coast” tradition:  Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Brett Weston, Wynn Bullock, and Paul Caponigro.

Backing up several years, when I was around 5 years old, my mother took me to see The Seven Wonders of the World, a Cinerama production by Lowell Thomas, in downtown Chicago.  I remember little else about that movie, but what I do remember was a scene from the narrow gauge railway leading up from the plains of India to the hill station of Darjeeling, at the foot of Kangchenjunga, the third highest mountain in the world.  This was when I first learned of the Himalaya: mountains far taller, younger, and less hospitable than my grandfather’s friendly old Appalachians.  I certainly never thought it possible that I would one day visit those mountains and later live in their foothills.

In a stroke of good luck, a few of my older Idaho friends were planning a major trek in eastern Nepal for the fall of 1977.  I was in graduate school by then but was determined to do whatever it took to go.  I used my life savings for the 50-day trek that began in the lowland Terai of eastern Nepal, moving through the middle hills to Makalu Base Camp, then over three 20,000-foot passes into the Khumbu (Everest) region.  This trek influenced me profoundly.  It gave me the confidence that I could travel through and enjoy rugged high mountain terrain.  It also opened my eyes to a different world where people appeared to live in harmony with their environment, or at least were doing a better job of it than we westerners were.  This experience inspired me to return to Nepal as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the early 1980s where I designed and built gravity flow water systems for villages in the foothills of the Himalaya.  Since those days, I’ve returned to Nepal many times to lead treks, oversee water and sanitation projects and, most recently, to build a new school to replace one that was destroyed in the Gorkha earthquake of 2015.  I’ve also had the good fortune to realize a dream kindled on that 1977 trek, to photograph the Himalaya with a view camera.

In 1980, through an old Idaho connection, a job in northern New Mexico at Los Alamos opened up.  I had briefly visited this Land of Enchantment the year before while returning from a backpack trip in Utah.  I could not resist the opportunity to live in a beautiful place near the Rockies of Colorado and the canyon country of the Colorado Plateau.  The great arts tradition of Santa Fe and Taos was also a big draw for me.  A few years later, I married Laura, the daughter of my next door neighbors.  We raised one daughter Anna, who now lives in Denver.  I left the Lab in 1990 and for 22 years, ran a small consulting practice, specializing in high temperature waste and materials conversion processes and air pollution control.  Laura and I continue to live in Santa Fe and I continue to venture into the mountains and canyons with my heavy camera kit.

I am self-taught in photography and though my science background has certainly helped with its technical aspects, the medium’s creative potential was what first drew me in and continues to maintain a firm hold.  I photograph in large format color as well and plan for this work to be on a future web site.  For color, I’m now using a Nikon digital SLR.  But for black and white photography, I still prefer using a view camera along with the silver print making process to express the beauty and intricacy of the natural world.  My photographs have been published in Audubon calendars, the Himalayan calendar, and in books on the Southern Appalachians, the Rockies and the Southwest.

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

“Grace and Grandeur: The Photographs of Sam Stapleton and John Vavruska”, The Emporium Arts Center, Knoxville, Tennessee, May 3-31, 2019.  Web link:  https://www.knoxalliance.com/grace-and-grandeur-by-sam-stapleton-and-john-vavruska/

“Through the Lens: Creating Santa Fe“, Palace of the Governors, Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe, New Mexico, November 21, 2008 – October 25, 2009.

Johnsons of Madrid Gallery, Madrid, New Mexico, September 6 – October 30, 2003.

“Twenty Years of Seeing”, School for Advanced Research, Administration Building Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico, May 16 – August 15, 2003.

“Two Decades of Seeing”, Katrina Lasko Gallery, Bernalillo, New Mexico March 15 – April 11, 2003.

“The Intimate and the Vast – Landscape Photographs from Home and the Tibetan Plateau”, Back Street Bistro, Santa Fe, New Mexico, February 25 – April 12, 2000.

“Landscape Photographs from the Past Dozen Years”, Bank of Santa Fe Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico, May 1-31, 1996.

“Que Pasa?! – Art in New Mexico 1995”, Fuller Lodge Art Center and Gallery, Los Alamos, New Mexico, February 24 – March 26, 1995.

“Environmental Eye“, 31 Burro Alley Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico, June 5 – 25, 1992.

“Nepal:  The People and the Landscape“, Unitarian Church of Santa Fe, New Mexico, March – May 1990.

BOOKS

Roseann S. Willink and Paul G Zolbrod, Weaving a World:  Textiles and the Navajo Way of Seeing, Museum of New Mexico Press, 1996.

REVIEWS

“Forces of Nature”, in Pasatiempo, The Santa Fe New Mexican’s Weekly Arts & Entertainment Magazine, June 20, 2003.

“Photography Exhibit Emphasizes Traditional Approach”, in the Sandoval Arts section of the Sandoval Signpost, Vol. 15 No. 4, promoting the art and cultural events of Sandoval County, New Mexico, April 2003.

“Found Subjects” in Pasatiempo, The Santa Fe New Mexican’s Weekly Arts & Entertainment Magazine, February 25, 2000.

“Grand Canyons – Nature Exalted through Vavruska’s Lens” in Pasatiempo, The Santa Fe New Mexican’s Weekly Arts & Entertainment Magazine, May 10, 1996.

“Revealing a Common Thread in Nature” in Pasatiempo, The Santa Fe New Mexican’s Weekly Arts & Entertainment Magazine, June 5, 1992.

PRESENTATIONS

“Visions of Grace and Majesty:  Photographing the American West”, at the Southwest Seminars Mother Earth, Father Sky Series: Perspectives on the Environment of the American West, Santa Fe, New Mexico, December 1, 2009.

EDUCATION

Bachelor of Science, Chemical Engineering, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, 1973
Graduate Studies, Biomedical Engineering, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1974
Master of Science, Chemical Engineering, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 1978