In 2004, I became interested in photography and embarked on a personal journey to photograph my hometown: D.C.

For several years, I quietly pursued my passion, photographing the architecture and cityscapes I saw on the D.C. streets I traveled each day.

It was around 2011, while driving down Florida Avenue, N.E., near the “old” D.C. Farmers Market, that my years-long journey was thrown off course, when I encountered a developer’s billboard promising to render this historic D.C. neighborhood unrecognizable in words that read:

“Pretty soon, you won’t recognize the place. Promise.”

It was, literally, in that moment that I decided to publish my images of the city—many of which had already begun to vanish from the D.C. landscape.

My photobook, The D.C. I See—Art of a Vanishing City, is a retrospective of my decade and a half-long journey photographing, mostly, D.C. architecture, from 2005 to 2018. The photobook includes fifty-two, color images, divided into ten themed sections.

“I could hardly believe the words I was reading, emblazoned on the huge developer’s billboard, corner of 4th and Florida Avenue, circa 2011. Even as I recall the moment, I am filled with the same shock and disbelief I felt then, struggling to comprehend how anyone could make such a brazen pronouncement of their intention—correction, “promise”—to obliterate this landscape beyond our recognition. Clearly, they presumed that we, who are of this city, found this place as objectionable as they, obviously, did. But, they could not have been more wrong...”

Carolyn Toye