The Trail

After spending a quarter-century photographing America’s national parks, I turned my attention to the landscapes of my city, San Jose, California. This shift mirrors an evolution in environmental thought: from conserving distant wilderness to an inclusive ecology that recognizes nature and human life as inseparable.

Within walking distance of my home, the Coyote Creek Trail—a paved path bordered by a narrow strip of nature—winds twenty miles through suburban development. The trail is not remote or pristine, but a managed urban ecosystem where human control continually presses against the persistence—and occasional wildness—of the creek corridor. Over more than 150 visits, I became attuned to its shifts—seasonal rhythms, wildlife patterns, and the cycles of drought and flood.

These changes are mirrored in a transient human presence. The creek corridor was once home to the Jungle, the nation's largest homeless encampment. Makeshift shelters continued to appear and disappear. For some, the trail is a place to pass through; for others, it is a home. Shared by joggers, cyclists, and residents with nowhere else to go, the trail has become a quietly contested space, where layered uses and overlapping claims expose the tension between recreation, conservation, and survival.

Set in the heart of Silicon Valley, The Trail reveals a landscape missing from Silicon Valley's mythology. The corridor is simultaneously wildlife habitat, recovering ecosystem, public recreation space, and precarious home. In 2025, new environmental policies, reinforced by a 2024 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, led to the clearance of the remaining encampments and the establishment of no-encampment zones. The photographs therefore record not only a place but a turning point: the final visible days of a creekside community, asking what caring for both people and the environment requires.

Through repeated observation over more than a decade, including rephotography and grids, The Trail explores how ecological restoration, recreation, infrastructure, and displacement continually remake the same landscape. By treating a suburban recreational trail as the subject of sustained photographic inquiry, it brings an overlooked type of public landscape into view. While rooted in one creek corridor, the project speaks to changing urban environments far beyond Silicon Valley, where the meanings of nature, public space, and belonging are increasingly negotiated on the same ground.

The Trail, Cleared

Across the country, cities are reclaiming marginal lands, often in places where unhoused people have lived. The Trail, Cleared examines what happens when ecological recovery and human displacement occupy the same ground.

The work begins after the fragile coexistence documented in The Trail ended. Following a series of 2025 abatements that displaced nearly everyone living along the trail and established no-encampment zones, I returned to familiar sites and found familiar faces gone. I photographed instead the traces of their presence and the regrowth that gradually covered them.

The Trail, Cleared takes the project’s practice of repeated observation further, applying systematic rephotography to cleared encampment sites. Repeating the same viewpoints over time and assembling them in grids, I use photography not only to record physical change, but also to question what counts as restoration and what is being erased. The creek corridor may appear healed, but the grids resist a simple narrative of renewal.