About

This project captures a pivotal moment in Seattle’s history, where issues of homelessness, graffiti, and civic control intersect in ways that challenge public perception and policy. Through photography and narrative, Brandon Bye documents the city’s shifting identity, offering an unfiltered reflection of its streets, its people, and the systems that govern them.

This book is not a flower to the nose. This is a book of landscape photography and cultural translation, showing Seattle’s struggle for civic control in 2023 and 2024. The nation is aging. It’s wrestling with that, with its identity, with its appearance.

By framing graffiti and homelessness as intertwined indicators of societal change rather than isolated issues, this work invites deeper engagement with the forces shaping contemporary urban life. It explores the tension between public and private space, the role of artistic expression in contested environments, and the cyclical nature of erasure and resurgence—both in graffiti culture and in broader socio-economic realities.

Bye’s photographs of the streets are layered, lonely, disquietingly familiar. He moves across physical and psychological spaces, attending to the shadows. In these photos, you feel the tension of the times, a historic time when the number of people living on the streets spiked and became a potent political issue driving elections, a time when graffiti laws were loosened and then tightened. It’s all relatively chaotic, and the invisible forces that move this type of chaos are convoluted, to say the least. Solutions: slippery.

This work highlights the simple importance of slowing down and looking around, observing our surroundings in stillness, not in motion. Our environment is speaking to us. Are we listening?

Beyond simply recording what is, this project asks essential questions: Who has the right to the city? What does ownership mean in a place where displacement is constant? And how do our responses to visible disorder reveal deeper truths about power, governance, and collective responsibility?

Although public opinion varies on the topics presented here, the seesaw teeters on one unanimous, if temporary, agreement — More Paint.

This work does not propose easy solutions. Instead, it serves as a mirror, prompting viewers to slow down, look closely, and consider their relationship to the evolving cityscape. By amplifying the voices of those often overlooked—graffiti writers, unhoused individuals, and those caught in the margins—it fosters dialogue around civic policies, social justice, and the unintended consequences of urban development.

Ultimately, this book is a testament to the power of bearing witness. It asserts that acknowledging what we see—without turning away—is the first step toward meaningful change.