Georgetown, 2024
MORE PAINT
This is landscape photography. It reflects the environment—and lays bare Seattle’s struggle for civic control between 2023 and 2025, a time when the city adds nearly 36,000 new residents. Current population: 816,000. With growth comes growing pains: more tents, more tags, and a public caught between looking away and cracking down. Graffiti and homelessness aren’t just problems—they’re symptoms. Signals. Proof that the ecosystem is under strain.
City crews clear camps and paint over walls. Then the camps come back. So does the graffiti. Laws loosen, tighten, reverse. Repetition—fast, messy, and unrelenting. And although public opinion varies on the subjects shown here, the seesaw teeters on one unanimous, if temporary, agreement—MORE PAINT.
Georgetown, 2023
Landscape and Lineage
The city is a living system, its skin shedding and regenerating all the time. Streets get carved in, paved, repaved, expanded. Buildings rise, fall, and rise again—rubble and scaffolding, scars and mends. Graffiti is part of this process. Some cry vandalism, others claim art. Perspectives aside, it is an announcement. A marker of what a city is, and what it is becoming.
CLEPTO was—and still is, if you're looking—almost unavoidable. Other writers respect the name and generally don’t write over it. Before CLEPTO, LABRAT was highly active. And before LABRAT, work by AJAR was abundant. There is a natural, mostly peaceful succession in this community.
Capitol Hill, 2023
Bitter Lake, 2025
Fremont, 2025
The Jungle
During the Great Depression, a shantytown of an estimated 600 shacks and 1,000 inhabitants grew into what's now called the East Duwamish Greenbelt, or, The Jungle. The area consists of 150 acres underneath and along an elevated section of Interstate 5—another world, desolate and haunting and beautiful, a world where you might bump into God, or the Devil, or no one at all, just the high-alert whir of deep thoughts and primal fears.
For graffiti writers, The Jungle is a Mecca. The elevation of the interstate provides good wall visibility, and the day-and-night traffic ensures a constant audience. Visibility and audience: two key ingredients many writers consider.
For everyone else, The Jungle doesn't really exist beyond glimpses from the interstate, colorful, large-scale graffiti flickering from behind concrete support columns and a scattering of tarps fashioned as walls and roofs.
The Jungle, 2024
The Jungle, 2024
The Jungle, 2024
RULE OF LAW
On June 13, 2023, US District Court Judge Marsha Pechman issued an injunction barring the City of Seattle from enforcing its ban on graffiti. The case came from an arrest involving sidewalk chalk protest messages including "peaceful protest," "Fuck SPD," and "BLM." In her ruling, Pechman found the law overly broad, pointing out that, as written, it allowed police to arrest people for "attaching a streamer to someone else's bicycle or writing a note of 'hello' on a classmate's notebook without express permission."
On February 2, 2024, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Pechman's ruling, reinstating Seattle's graffiti law, which bars unauthorized writing, painting, or drawing on public property. Efforts to cover up the accumulation of graffiti increased, and the tug-of-war continues.
SoDo, 2025
Industrial District, 2025
Rainier Beach, 2025
Harbor Island, 2024
OWNERSHIP
It's no secret that corporations wield enormous, often invisible, political power. In a corporatocracy the economy is king, and corporate personhood—a legal notion that gives companies the same rights as individuals—is the law of the land.
Imagine if the current model of land ownership were swapped for a model of land stewardship. Land as commodity becomes land as community. An alternative line of questioning, then, is who and what belongs in this city?
Capitol Hill, 2024
10th Avenue South, 2023
WITNESS
Homelessness is painful—emotionally, physically, morally. While shooting this book, I often thought about how war photographers must feel before, during, and after a day’s work. Taking some of these photos felt wrong. Looking at them might feel wrong too.
But as critic John Berger said, “The opposite of living with this world is indifference, is a turning away.” To say no to something, we must first say yes—not in endorsement, but in acknowledgment.
Pike Street, 2024
South Dearborn Street, 2024
Occidental Avenue South, 2024
As neutral as the tide
The landscape here is changing rapidly. Cover-ups and encampment sweeps are cosmetic solutions to deeper, more complex issues—problems born from the accumulative effects of civilization itself.
Like a fever signals the flu, or extreme weather signals climate change, the rise of graffiti and homelessness is a symptom—a visible echo—of a torn economy, environment, and social fabric. It’s all reaping and sowing. Cause and effect. A kind of evolution pulling in all directions—toward comfort, toward cruelty. A force as neutral and unrelenting as the tide.
Georgetown, 2024
Pioneer Square, 2024
Belltown, 2024