Ferguson became a focus of national attention after eighteen-year-old Michael Brown was shot and killed by police officer Darren Wilson in August 2014. Protests and unrest followed, bringing national scrutiny to policing and racial inequality in the St. Louis suburb. A subsequent U.S. Department of Justice investigation found that Ferguson’s police and municipal court systems disproportionately burdened Black residents through stops, citations, fines and fees. Damaged and abandoned buildings became part of the physical landscape left by the unrest.

I went to Ferguson in 2015, after Michael Brown’s killing and the protests that followed had put the city at the center of a national argument about policing and race. I was interested in what remained on the ground after the television cameras moved on—how the events had marked ordinary streets, storefronts and buildings.