Graffiti is a topic of huge debate in Seattle. In recent years, the City has taken steps to prosecute graffiti writers, going so far as to fine them tens of thousands of dollars. Some, however, argue that a city without graffiti isn’t really a city at all. And through all the noise, the Seattle Graffiti Rangers methodically cover up the graffiti thrown up in public spaces.
Whatever your personal feelings about graffiti, photographer Brandon Bye’s new coffee table book, More Paint, is a thoughtful reflection on two years of street art in Seattle and how it reflects city politics, homelessness, and growth. The book officially drops on Feb. 12 with photos from the book on display at Vermilion Art Gallery that same day for the Capitol Hill Art Walk.
While More Paint features locations across the city, many images are situated in the South End, which Bye calls home. He first started photographing his neighborhood, documenting graffiti in Hillman City. From there, the project expanded to using graffiti as a lens with which to look at public space and how it is continually redefined by the City, by graffiti writers, by poverty.
“Doing this work for me came from a place of just trying to understand the environment I live in,” said Bye in a recent interview. “I think that's what people do when they make things.”
In the introduction, Bye says the book’s photos, taken in Seattle from 2023 to 2025, were taken during the same period when 36,000 new residents moved to the city. The images reference the economic pressures of accommodating a growing populace. “With growth comes growing pains: more tents, more tags, and a public caught between looking away and cracking down,” he writes.
During this same time period, there was a tug of war on a civic level on how to attack the “problem” of graffiti. In June 2023, a U.S. District Court judge barred the City from enforcing its graffiti ban. Then after the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that ruling in 2024, the Seattle City Council passed an ordinance allowing the City to fine graffiti writers $1,500 per tag. But looking at the photographs, that tug of war isn’t really apparent. Seattle is just as painted as ever.
The genesis of More Paint started during a trip Bye took to Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 2023 where he connected with graffiti writers, NO ME BAÑO, in the city, which, like Seattle, struggles with homelessness and inequality. On his return to Seattle, his experiences in Argentina made him think about graffiti in a totally different light. “I saw the connection that this accumulation of paint and street life was a symptom of the state of the world, the state of the city,” he said. “So I started photographing [graffiti] in Seattle obsessively.”
At first, Bye told me he started taking pictures off the cuff, following his instincts on what to capture: a graffitied corner of an alley in Chinatown-International District or a paint-dripped building in Beacon Hill. But as he started to build up a body of work, he approached the landscapes more intentionally, eventually crafting the different chapters of the book. In “The Jungle” he documents the thriving graffiti scene on the I-5 underpass near the East Duwamish Greenbelt, where bright tags meet verdant green ivy. Or in “Ownership,” which explores the idea of who owns our shared spaces by focusing on photos of verbose tags, dilapidated buildings, and graffiti on new buildings.
But, to me, the most intriguing aspect of More Paint is the chapter that captures cover-ups maintained either by the City or private citizens tasked with scrubbing graffiti from their property. In a lot of ways, these cover-ups Bye photographed are just as intrusive as the graffiti itself, bold blocks of mishmashed colors. And, ironically, the perfect canvas for writers to throw up a tag or two again. It underscores the Sisyphean task of graffiti writing and removal, one pushing the other to exist; it also speaks to the cycles and rhythms of the city Bye is so interested in documenting.
In the course of doing this project, Bye said his relationship with the city around him changed greatly. Before, he “didn’t really have strong opinions about how our city was changing, [he] was just observing that it was changing,” Bye reflected. But in taking the time to photograph the streets and people who shape them, he felt much more enraptured by the Seattle that surrounded him.
“Taking photographs is a practice in stillness, and we live in just such a fast-paced world. I think most of the time we see graffiti and we see street life in motion, our attention maybe holds it for a second before we pass it by, and then we're on to something else,” he said. “So this work kind of stopped me, slowed me down, and had me sit with what's going on, in a way that it hadn't before. I guess that's an effect that I would like for this work to have on people.”
A short run of books, also called More Paint, will be available on Feb. 12 at Vermillion Art Gallery during the Capitol Hill Art Walk. Preorders can be made on Brandon Bye’s website and copies will be available at Elliott Bay Books and Third Place Books.
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