Reuben van Hoeve

Seattle, Washington

This body of work concerns my experience documenting Seattle’s Duwamish River. I began photographing the river as a recent transplant to Seattle in order to learn more about my newly adopted city. There was some inherent tension, I felt, between the Seattle which portrays itself as a hub of environmentalism and progressivism, and the river which exists as a scar of both the city’s settler colonial foundation, and its historic exploitation of the land which it was born of. These images exist as a journal of that tension. Nothing more, nothing less.