Across the country, cities are reclaiming marginal lands, often in places where unhoused people have lived. The Trail, Cleared examines the collision of ecological recovery and human displacement.
Over more than 200 visits, I came to know the Coyote Creek Trail—a paved path bordered by a narrow strip of nature within walking distance of my home in San Jose—as a landscape where the boundary between the wild and the human blurs. From 2014 to 2024, I photographed this corridor as a contested space shared by wildlife, trail users, and unhoused residents. The Trail, Cleared begins after that fragile coexistence ended. As a result of new policies, a series of 2025 abatements displaced nearly everyone living along the trail.
Returning afterward and missing familiar faces, I photographed instead the traces of their presence and the regrowth that gradually covered them. Using rephotography, I repeat the same viewpoints over time and assemble them in grids, recording physical change while questioning what counts as restoration and what is being erased in one of the world’s most prosperous regions. The square black-and-white photographs evoke cycles of persistence and loss while framing human and natural subjects in equal measure.
The creek corridor may appear healed, but the grids resist a simple narrative of renewal. They ask viewers to consider the moral imperative to protect both people and the environment, while exploring broader questions of transformation: of nature, public space, and how we understand our complex place within the land.
