DEAR LITTLE HILL

When East Bay photographer, Michelle Mendieta Mitchell and I got curious about the SF Chronicle’s series, The Graying Bay, we began creating a photo archive of what life in our own neighborhood looks like.

Date: ongoing 2025–26

Method: photographic community archive

Impact: The project is ongoing and continues to gain momentum as a neighborhood collaboration. The growing body of photographs has also surfaced as a hyperlocal way of moving beyond a flat demographic story of housing shortages and affordability issues as we explore the spectrum of lives lived in our neighborhood.

We’ve been invited to exhibit the collection at a local WOB and look forward to how the project will evolve in 2026.

M and her pullet, Honey

neighbor Don and his BunBun

a young family that attends school on our block explores the local granite

P and her companion, Bubba

Is your organization working to make demographics come to life in vivid color? Let’s work together!

CHINESE CULTURAL CENTER + EDGE ON THE SQUARE: WE ARE IMMORTAL! PROCESSION

We Are Immortal! demonstrates how images can serve as tools for visibility, dignity, and collective memory.

Partners: Chinese Cultural Center and Edge on the Square

Date & Place: May 24, 2025; Chinatown, San Francisco
Event: First Chinatown Pride Procession and Festival, under the theme We Are Immortal
Focus Area: Cultural equity, LGBTQ+ visibility, intergenerational storytelling
Methods: photo documentation, participatory presence

Background: Chinatown holds deep legacies of activism and art but, as in many places globally, queer histories here have often been under-told or erased. Our partner organizations wanted to document the event in ways that honor community voices, intergenerational connections, and embodied joy for both the present and for the future.

Approach: Drawing from visual ethnography as embodied, sensory, and relational, the photography process emphasized minimal staging, attention to joy, dignity, and co-creation.

Impacts and results:

•Cultural Visibility: Images made queer Chinatown histories visible—contributing to resisting erasure.
•Organizational Assets: Photos now serve partners (SF Chinese Cultural Center & Edge on the Square) as festival marketing, web galleries, advocacy material.
•Community Engagement: Participants saw themselves reflected, affirming identity and legacy.
•Documentation for the Future: A visual record that becomes archive—proof of presence, proof of hope.

The procession on The Friendship Bridge

Free Mom Hugs + Rice Rockettes

city dignitaries, politicians, artists, activists, and community members catch joy of the day

First Annual Chinatown Pride Procession

“Chinatown is profoundly queer—not just in identity, but in existence. Its queerness stands as an act of defiance against racism, displacement, and corporate encroachment. This history runs deep through San Francisco’s cultural fabric, inspiring an ‘immortality’ that lives on in those who continue our fight against erasure.”

— CCC + Edge on the Square

procession participants point out Chinatown landmarks

Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory hand out samples of their famous cookies

elders entertain with traditional drumming

silent disco fundraiser at SF Chinese Cultural Center

DIY: WAYS YOUR ORGANIZATION CAN DO THIS WORK

• Begin with immersion—walk the spaces, feel the atmosphere.

• Let participants co-create what is documented.

• Seek details that evoke sensory and emotional registers, not just events.

• Share images back to community for reflection.

• Build dual outputs: public storytelling + internal archive for memory-keeping.

WANT TO WORK TOGETHER?

Let’s design processes that honor your community’s presence and ensure its stories endure.

Welcome Home: Housing First for Veterans in Beaumont, California

Partners: LINC Housing

Date & Place: March 2025; Beaumont, California

Focus Area: housing, visibility, intergenerational storytelling

Methods: photo documentation

Impacts and results:

• Cultural Visibility: What people imagine when they think of military veterans might be incomplete. In these photographs, we feature the range of people—mothers, children, elders, and others—who have served in the armed forces and who are now served by LINC Housing.

• Organizational Assets: These photographs now help illuminate LINC Housing’s mission and vision online and in print.

Supportive housing for veterans often means a quiet place after a season of chaos. It sometimes means a studio apartment where sunlight filters through curtains, where pink-filigreed furnishings welcome tired bodies after a long workday, or where there is space to host a small dinner with friends. Housing can mean an enduring welcome and a sense of belonging.

Want help telling the stories of the people who make your organization’s fight worth fighting? Let’s work together!

Engineering Our Biophilic Future: UCSC'S Baskin School of Engineering

Partners: University of California Santa Cruz, Baskin School of Engineering

Place : Santa Cruz, California

Focus Area: Higher Education, STEM

Methods: environmental head shots

Impacts and results:

• Visibility: UC Santa Cruz’s Baskin School of Engineering wanted imagery that reflected its camaraderie, natural beauty, and resources.

• Organizational Assets: These environmental head shots now help current and potential students at University of California Santa Cruz’s Baskin School of Engineering better imagine what it feels like to learn on a lush campus surrounded by people researching big data, cyber-physical systems, genomics, and computational media.

Want help communicating what’s great about life and learning on your campus? Let’s work together to help potential students find their next academic home.

A Place of Our Own: Stable Housing in the City of Angels

This collection of collaborative photographs, co-created with LINC Housing residents in their favorite home places help bridge understanding of what home can mean to people who have lived outside.

Partner: LINC Housing

Date: ongoing since 2022

Focus Area: housing, migration, placemaking

Method: photographic community archive of environmental portraits highlighting what home looks like.

Why it matters: It can be difficult to understand the urgency and complexity of California’s housing situation without sitting with people who have encountered its raw challenges.

The photographs now populate organizational communication and funding appeals and grant proposals attempting to fill in where the federal government’s policies leave a gap.

I’m grateful to the many people who welcomed me into their homes for this photographic series—who introduced me to their parakeets or explained what the diplomas were for or shared early memories of childhood in Cuba.

Want help creating visual narratives that can carry the dignity and nuance people’s stories deserve? Let’s work together.

Hem + Jaleo: Upcycling and Flamenco with Fafafoom's Mira Musank

Partners: Climate Creative, Fafafoom

Place : The Dome Center for Performing Arts in Oakland, California

Focus Area: climate advocacy, STEAM

Methods: event photography, styled portraits

Impacts and results:

• Visibility: Hem & Jaleo sprang from the imagination of talented textile artist Mira Musank (of Fafafoom)—a way to interact with the work she created during her residency with Climate Creative.

• Organizational Assets: These photographs helped document Mira’s fashion show and also illustrated her beautiful vision for funding to help her project grow.

  And it worked! You can now see her gathered cloths dress on the cover of Elle—just one more step along the way of bringing Mira’s hope of repurposing textile waste to life.

Hosted at The Dome, the event invited the audience to participate in life drawing as models moved around the space wearing Mira's creations made entirely from textile waste—pre-consumer cutouts, sewing remnants, and pre-owned clothes.

Agua Clara Flamenco then brought Mira's upcycled textile designs to life on the stage transporting a rapt audience through song and rhythm through the music of Andalusia.

Are you hatching an innovative project for the social good? Let’s work together to photo-illustrate your beautiful idea!

On Assignment: Knoxville, Tennessee

iPhone 13 | Knoxville, Tennessee

PROCESS:

We start all visual storytelling and participatory projects with a listening session—collaborative inquiry—learning what’s at stake and what stories need to be told to illustrate an organization’s work.

We establish a visual language that resonates with that work. Whether through photography, visual research, or community photo voice, we work to tell the passion at its center, what it looks like at the human scale, and what it means to the people your organization shows up for.

Our work results in a curated collection of images and insights partner organizations can use across platforms—anchored in their mission and resonant with their good work.

On location in Knoxville, Tennessee for UMASS Magazine recently, my assignment was also informed by the gorgeous issue of Mergoat Magazine I picked up in a cafe and flipped through before walking through Old Gray Cemetery. It was changed by unexpectedly heavy rain as it was prevented from falling on a carefully groomed Smokies baseball diamond. It was flavored by my producer’s nostalgia that resulted in a late-night stop at the Waffle House.

Making work that combines the sensation of rain-on-skin and the specter of invasive kudzu and the taste of a stack of late-night pancakes into a story about a very specific place might be my favorite kind of alchemy.

I’m grateful it’s also what In Good Company calls collaboration.

Images from the Knoxville sessions are embargoed until the articles publish; images included here are iPhone BTS

Are you looking to tell the story of a place? Let’s work together!

I Am First Gen: photographing in support of academic thriving at UMASS

The Body + The Land: Bioregional Belonging at the Albany Bulb

This spring, in partnership with Invisible International and Climate Creative, we kicked off a collaborative community-based research project exploring how were we live shapes our health. The Body + The Land project recognizes the connections between people, animals, plants, and a shared environment.*

The project hopes to surface and gather community knowledge that can be used by local organizations to shape local health initiatives. Over the next year we will be exploring how Bay Area residents see how where they live—the hills they walk daily, the commutes they undertake, the atmospheric rivers they weather, the gardens they grow—is shaping their health.

For the research project kick-off I developed a site-specific, kid-friendly photo walk to facilitate new encounters—with pollinators! with the bright superbloom!—between visitors and the Albany Bulb.

The Body

+ The Land Photo Walk

an invitation to explore the Albany Bulb

The kick-off party was an opportunity chance to gather input and engage the Bulb communally, but we will be working all year long, inviting community members to call in to leave their observations at (510) 519-1506. If you are local to the Bay Area, you can participate, too. Call in to leave your observations about how where we live is shaping your health.

*framework: One Health

billy mark: 37.45°N 122.17°W

Offering was born from what artist Billy Mark had begun calling, in phone conversations between Detroit and San Francisco, the low-down surveillance blues.

Our collaboration eventually bloomed into an interactive storytelling project and a book, but it started as a series of questions Billy was asking about what it felt like to be traced and tracked and monitored and to have what is known about us monetized by, among others, Google.

Composer Jon Armstrong, and I joined Billy for this collaboration, using a soundwalk app to map seven of Jon's compositions to seven sites around Google's headquarters in Mountainview, Ca.

Billy and I spent a day traveling clockwise around the Googleplex perimeter, seeing and being seen, in a kind of contemplative migration.

We moved from site to site, in the grooves of older rhythms of contemplation: 5 am, 7 am, 9 am, noon, 3 pm, 5 pm, and finally 7 pm.

Using an iPhone and a handheld speaker, Jon’s compositions were triggered whenever we arrived at a new site on the soundmap. Billy’s performance in each specific location wove together the sounds, our inquiry, and specific place we occupied.

For me, working with Billy and Jon to create Offering meant asking what photographs might become in conversation with music and movement.

What if I embraced the limitations of a particularly dark hour and let the representation go subtle and unfocused?

What if the combination of music and movement made me look away from Billy and toward something else?

What if—as happened during the making of the imagery at 3pm, I made images while being misconstrued by bystanders as a woman photographing a body she had found floating in Kaiser Creek instead of attempting to call out for help rescuing it?

Offering, is an story of our particular encounter, and the soundmap remains live—an invitation, as Billy says—for anyone who gets overcome by those low-down surveillance blues.

Sound + Color: in Dakar, Senegal

In Senegal, we soaked in the sun, the music, and the beautiful vibes under Baobab trees, in market places, on boats out on Lac Rose.

We painted with bright watercolors in the slant light while our loved ones drummed late into the afternoon.

We danced in celebration of a New Year and renewed love. We threw our arms around old friends and carried new babies on our hips. We shook off the slumber and constrictions of isolated pandemic years and shared community plates as our bent knees touched other bent knees and our laughter spilled down from the rooftop onto the streets of Dakar.