Paint Louis 2025

In 2025, I continued photographing Paint Louis, the long-running public art and graffiti gathering along the Mississippi River floodwall in St. Louis. Each year the event transforms the riverfront into a temporary landscape of color, scale, movement, and layered visual storytelling.

My interest in the project extends beyond documenting murals alone. I’m drawn to the atmosphere surrounding the event—the changing light along the floodwall, the industrial architecture of the riverfront, artists moving between unfinished sections, spectators pausing unexpectedly, and the way weather and time alter the experience of the work throughout the day.

Rather than presenting the murals as isolated subjects, I photograph them as part of a larger urban environment shaped by human presence, movement, and transition. Many of the images focus on moments that feel unresolved: partially completed walls, figures between actions, reflections after rain, shifting shadows, or quiet spaces that exist briefly between periods of activity.

Paint Louis continues to represent an important intersection of public art, graffiti culture, architecture, and community within St. Louis. The scale and temporary nature of the work create an environment that changes constantly, making observation and timing central to the photographic process.

The photographs from the 2025 project continue my broader exploration of atmosphere, narrative ambiguity, and the relationship between people and place throughout the American Midwest.