Brandon Bye presents 'MORE PAINT'

Third Place Books welcomes photographer Brandon Bye to our Seward Park store for a conversation about his new book, MORE PAINT: a visual meditation on place and power showcasing push-and-pull in Seattle's public spaces: between graffiti artists and coverers-up, between visibility and erasure, between those who wield control and those who evade it.

This event is free and open to the public. For important updates, RSVP is highly recommended in advance. This event will include a public signing and time for audience Q&A. Sustain our author series by purchasing a copy of the featured book!

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This event is free to attend. For important updates, registration is highly recommended in advance.

A meditation on place and power, MORE PAINT sketches a portrait of Seattle in the midst of unraveling and reassembly. Brandon Bye’s photographs are sharp and disquietingly familiar—scenes we pass without seeing. Paired with spare, unsentimental prose, Bye captures a city grinding against itself, a city where homelessness, policy, and civic identity crash and splinter.

Between permanence and erasure, ownership and displacement, this debut photobook is a study in tensions. It invites us to question the forces shaping our environment, to stop and look again at what gets covered up, and why.

Photographed over two years and spanning 156 pages, MORE PAINT documents a pivotal moment in Seattle’s history, following as it navigates the layered politics of public space. Across seven chapters, Bye offers an unfiltered reflection of the city’s shifting identity, tracing graffiti, encampments, and the architecture, and aesthetics, of erasure. Printed on uncoated stock and bound with care, the book stands as both object and archive—a still-point amid the motion, preserving the textures and patterns of a city remade.

Brandon Bye has been a paperboy, a cook, a soccer coach, a writer, and an editor. He studied writing in his twenties, made music in his thirties, and found his way to photography by forty. He grew up in New Hampshire and has lived in Seattle since 2008. More Paint, his debut book, was developed with editor Lisa van Dam-Bates and publisher Nate Gowdy, and shaped through ongoing conversation with artists and community members living within the conditions that the work records.

About Third Place Books

Founded in 1998 in Lake Forest Park, Washington, Third Place Books is dedicated to the creation of a community around books and the ideas inside them. With locations in Lake Forest Park and Seattle's Ravenna and Seward Park neighborhoods, Third Place Books is proud to serve the entire Seattle metro area. Learn more about their event series at thirdplacebooks.com/events.

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