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On the edge of Boeing Field, hemmed by runways and abandoned gravel roads, the Georgetown Steam Plant looms, blockish and impenetrable, straight out of Gotham. Inside looks like the belly of the Titanic: steel boilers, turbines, and pumps twisting through a space so immense it’s been dubbed an industrial cathedral. In 1907, the machine roared, hissed, and howled as it drew water from the Duwamish to power Seattle’s streetcars and the interurban to Tacoma. In 2026, pin-drop stillness hangs, interrupted only by the intermittent roar of jet engines taking off outside. Traces of breath hang in the air. It’s cold as a refrigerator inside.
Marcellus Bonow-Manier is dressed for the weather in a thick overcoat, boots, and a Seahawks cap. The 29-year-old photographer is the Steam Plant’s resident artist. He’s been here since September; what began as a one-month residency stretched to three months, then a year. Now it’s five.
“Last week, I discovered two new rooms that I didn’t know were here,” Bonow-Manier says as he takes us across an elevated walkway that cuts across the vast turbine hall. “That’s what excites me about this place. There are areas I’m intentionally not going to yet—not because I’ll get bored, but because I have time to pace myself. My process is very subconscious. I’m tapping into feelings.”
Bonow-Manier was raised in Seattle, born to a family of third-generation Seattleites. As a kid, he visited Georgetown often; his father’s friend owned Gessner Mansion—a three-story former brothel with a grievous past, also known as Georgetown Castle, that’s one of the most haunted houses in Seattle.
“Georgetown has always been the cool, historical, spooky neighborhood,” he recalls. “It always felt like we were driving two hours to get here, even though it’s 15 minutes from where I grew up. It just always felt distinct—if you’re in Georgetown, you feel it.”
He rattles off the neighborhood lore: a murder at the morgue where the Mafia locked workers in the incinerator and lit it; a man who fell from the Steam Plant and supposedly haunts the place; the working women and infants who died at Gessner. Then there’s the Duwamish itself. In 1907, it curved right past the plant. Once a flourishing ecosystem, the river has been straightened, choked, and trashed. Its fish are dead.
When Bonow-Manier applied for the residency, he proposed a deep dive into the supernatural lore of the Steam Plant.
“I didn’t want to just take ghost stories and recreate them,” he says. “I’m thinking more about world-building, about making a mythology. I don’t want to say ‘fan fiction,’ but this is almost my weird fan fiction of the Steam Plant and the entire area. I’ve been coming at this through the lens of Aesop’s Fables, Frankenstein, Lord of the Rings, or Doom—where there’s so much lore that helps complete immersion.”
The path from boyhood trips to Georgetown to Steam Plant seer was circuitous. Bonow-Manier came to photography through his love of fashion. He enrolled to study clothing design but quickly dropped out. In 2021, he picked up a camera to document a friend’s clothing collection. Capturing fashion imagery hooked him—especially fast-paced street photography.
Since then, Bonow-Manier has developed a photographic style that is energetic, graphic, and intuitive, almost exclusively rendered in stark black and white. Alongside a portfolio of fashion photography and curatorial projects, he founded the Emerald City Dispatch, a collaborative platform for photographic storytelling showcasing imagery from Seattle and the surrounding areas. As the residency extended in scope, his approach to photographing the site shifted as well—less run-and-gun action, more methodical investigation. “I’m wanting to photograph in a subconscious way,” he says. “Not looking or thinking, just shooting based on feeling.”
As he makes his way through the plant, he clutches a compact Ricoh GR digital camera. Its screen is fully busted, he explains, so he can’t see the picture in frame before shooting it, nor review the images until he uploads them. That’s why it’s his favorite. When something catches his attention—the traces of a note scribbled on the wall, a patch of paint peeling off steel, a bird’s bones crumpled on a window sill—he shoots. Sometimes it’s just a frisson in the air that coaxes him to take a picture, like a divining rod for 21st-century spirit photography. The results are, in his words, “some really weird, bizarre, crazy photos.”
He leads us up a maze of metal staircases to a tiny room that doubles as a makeshift studio. The walls are dusty yellow. There’s a small sink with a tarnished mirror. Narrow doorways open to storage closets and more tiny rooms. A row of lockers hold an assortment of cameras dangling from straps.
Because the site is a historic landmark, nothing can be hung on the walls. Instead, prints are arranged across a table, a window ledge, and the concrete floor. Some black-and-white images depict shadowy figures; others are Risograph reproductions of archival photos and Steam Plant schematics printed in soft cyan or brown. Another grouping consists of wide-angle instant photos shot on a medium-format camera with an instant back. Each image is a vignette, teetering between abstraction and recognizable object: errant bursts of flash, dreamy blurred color, forms that could be ectoplasm or just strange shadows.
Bonow-Manier is currently working on four projects at the Steam Plant. 13th & Greely, named for the abandoned intersection where the Steam Plant stands, will be the first series on display in August, with a zine release planned next year. Two of the projects are collaborative: INTERCESSION, with designer Dan McLean and Sid Grogan, and What’s Growing, with artist Mack Greene. One Best Way is another solo project combining Bonow-Manier’s photos and archival material with inspiration from Frank Bunker Gilbreth—of Cheaper by the Dozen fame—who designed the Steam Plant.
Since being decommissioned in 1977, the plant’s future has remained uncertain. In 2019, the Georgetown Steam Plant Community Development Authority formed to oversee operations on behalf of Seattle City Light, opening the site to public SHTEAM (science, history, technology, engineering, art, math) programming. The CDA signed a 60-year lease in 2021, and the plant has since hosted science fairs, new media festivals, music performances, immersive art and theater, and, of course, the residency program. It could become one of the world’s iconic arts institutions, but restoration and compliance upgrades will cost an estimated $20 million. Funding—in one of the richest cities in the nation—remains uncertain.
In the meantime, Bonow-Manier will be there, documenting the building and its lore. “I’m probably being a complete psycho, but the lease is for 55 more years,” he says. “If I could push it till the end, I would. I might still be alive by then.”
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