“On and on, life moves quickly. Scenes blur and become echoes. The transitory nature of graffiti and homelessness exemplify this phenomenon.
This is a book of landscape photography and cultural translation that reflects 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.
Brandon Bye’s photographs of the streets are layered, lonely, disquietingly familiar. He moves across physical and psychological spaces, attending to the shadows. In Bye’s pictures, 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?
Although public opinion varies on the topics presented here, the seesaw teeters on one unanimous, if temporary, agreement — More Paint.”
