REPOSSESS YOUR CITY

FOREWORD

This is, and will always be, an incomplete book. It’s a static attempt at capturing a dynamic city. Most of the locations photographed in this book have already changed from the pictures - the graffiti has been buffed away, or new art has been added, et cetera. The full extent of Portland’s graffiti scene can only be appreciated firsthand, from seeing the city evolve in real time.

I’ve lived in PDX my entire life. Some of the artists in this book have been active here since I was a little kid; others just started popping up as I worked on this project. These photos were taken from a myriad of neighborhoods across the city, including the Pearl

District, Chinatown, west 23rd, the west side waterfront, the Hollywood District, the Industrial District, and several others.

There are a lot of reasons why I decided to make this book, none of which are easy to articulate. I’ve had more luck explaining it out loud to people than writing anything coherent down. My best attempt is this: it’s both a love letter to the city and a fuck-you to the people that run it. I watch Portland politicians pour hundreds of thousands of dollars into cleaning up graffiti and arresting artists while they fail to offer any real solutions to help the people who live here. Their only response to any of the city’s ugliness is to cover it up. But the things they don’t want to see will always come back, and I think it deserves to be seen.

So here it is.

Right: “GOOD THINGS USUALLY HAPPEN 2 GOOD PEOPLE. SOMETIMES HAPPENS TO BAD PEOPLE... AND BAD THINGS HAPPEN 2 THE GOOD.“