Adrian Mendoza

I was born in Modesto, CA, the same hometown as filmmaker George Lucas.

I worked as a photojournalist for The Modesto Bee for 17 years and for the Manteca News for 6 years before that. In 2006, I began a documentation project of the California Delta, the largest estuary on the Pacific side of the Western Hemisphere. Key in the photography has been chronicling from the air, cataloguing more than 10 thousand images from an aerial perspective. The California Delta provides water for nearly 25 million Californians and - as population and privatization interests create a higher demand for water - climate change is diminishing the volume of water flowing through the delta.

I lived in San Francisco for 2 years and did periodic work for the local Huffington Post bureau and have been documenting the effects of gentrification, fueled primarily by tech start-ups, on neighborhoods, particularly the Mission District.

I'm now living in the North Bay city of Santa Rosa.