Crush Walls 2020

My office is in the RiNo area of Denver. Until recently, RiNo was largely a run down area littered with warehouses and manufacturing buildings. Over the six years I’ve been there I’ve witnessed it transform. Many of the warehouses have been demolished and replaced by apartment and condo buildings. Others have been transformed into market halls and offices. And walls, lots of walls, have been beautified by spray paint artists.

Crush Walls was founded 11 years ago, right around the dawn of the area’s transformation. Each year it hosts a week-long event in which artists from all over the world descend on the neighborhood to paint walls of buildings. The combination of their talent and massive “canvasses” makes for incredibly stunning visuals. It’s impossible now to walk a block without seeing several murals on various buildings.

This year’s event concluded yesterday. I went out near dusk one smoky evening last week to try and find artists still working at night, my favorite time to shoot. I found a few, plus a few completed walls from previous years that struck my eye.

As I do often with my photography work, I looked to capture moments in compositions with intentional design based on surrounding elements.