Commerce City, CO is a Denver suburb with a mixture of industrial and residential buildings. Home to a predominately working-class, Latinx community, it is the site of Suncor, a century-old oil refinery known for its toxic smell and long history with air pollution violations.
I first met Lucy Molina, a single mother and native resident of North Denver, when I photographed her for a story in The Denver Post. I’ve since continued to document her life and the town of Commerce City as they are forced to breathe poisonous toxins on a daily basis. This has allowed me to expand her story into a long-term project that calls attention to the enigmatic issue of environmental and climate injustice through a personal, familial narrative.
This project takes a solutions-based photojournalism approach to investigate and visually expose Suncor’s complicity in the environmental degradation of their surrounding community.