Brandon Bye w/ Lisa van Dam-Bates & Nate Gowdy, MORE PAINT

Photographer Brandon Bye shares his debut book More Paint, developed with editor Lisa van Dam-Bates and publisher Nate Gowdy. More Paint is a meditation on power and place, capturing Seattle at a crossroads where homelessness, graffiti, and civic control collide. Bye’s photographs—layered, lonely, disquietingly familiar—pair with unsentimental prose to document the city’s shifting landscape from 2023 to 2025.

Copies of More Paint will be available for purchase at the event.

The city revealed itself slowly, through what refused to stay gone.

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.

More Paint combines urban landscape photography with unsentimental prose. It reflects the environment and lays bare Seattle’s struggle for civic control between 2023 and 2025, a period marked by rapid growth and political swing. As the city added nearly 36,000 new residents, the population climbed to roughly 816,000. With growth came 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. Evidence 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. A repetition. A routine. A tide. And although public opinion varies on the topics presented here, the seesaw teeters on one unanimous, if temporary, agreement—MORE PAINT.

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. In 2023, he began spending sustained time in parts of the city most people pass through quickly—or avoid altogether—places repeatedly cleared, repainted, and redefined. What began as observation became a practice of returning: to the same blocks, walls, and alleys, watching their appearance and character shift incrementally. Meaning accumulated through repetition. 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.

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