74 days of Chaos
Agency and Resilience
The Book
Agency & Resilience is the 164-page photojournalism book that grew out of that period — more than six months of on-the-ground documentary work, made by someone who was there from the first morning. It is not an argument, and it doesn’t try to resolve what happened into a single, tidy narrative. It’s a record: photographs from the scene, the vigils, and the memorial, set alongside primary documents — transcripts, 911 calls, press conference statements, official communications — that are left, as much as possible, to speak for themselves. The camera stays close throughout, attentive to gesture and atmosphere as much as to action, to the quiet that follows a crowd as much as the crowd itself. The work organizes them chronologically and thematically, tracing how a single act of violence moved through a community over months, reshaping how people related to public space, to grief, and to each other.
There’s a long-standing argument in documentary photography that the hardest images to look at are often the most necessary ones — that the discomfort itself is doing real work, holding a fact in front of someone long enough that they can’t pretend not to have seen it. Agency & Resilience was built on that conviction. Bearing witness isn’t passive. It’s the mechanism by which information becomes something closer to reckoning, and it’s what closes the distance that lets injustice feel like someone else’s problem.
That’s what happened on Nicollet Avenue and on every corner the response touched after it. People showed up with phones, with flowers, with hand-lettered signs, often not knowing exactly what to do with what they were feeling — and in showing up, something shifted, in them and in the place itself.
This book exists because people need to see it, and because people have to make sure it isn’t forgotten.
On the Streets — Photojournalism as Witness
Witnessing Every Day
On the morning of January 24, 2026, Customs and Border Protection agents shot and killed Alex Pretti on Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis. Pretti was 37, an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA, a lawful gun owner with a permit to carry, and had no criminal history beyond a handful of traffic tickets. He was not in a mental health crisis. He was filming.
Trench had been photographing political protests since 2017, and that morning, he was on Nicollet Avenue too. That morning sat inside a much larger one. For weeks, Operation Metro Surge had brought an intensified federal ICE and CBP presence to the Minneapolis area, part of a broader pattern of immigration enforcement actions playing out in cities across the country. Pretti’s death turned that operation from a policy story into something a neighborhood could no longer hold at arm’s length. Within days, people who had never stood on a street corner with a sign in their hands were doing exactly that. Vigils formed. Protests grew. A memorial took shape on the sidewalk where he died, rebuilt every time it was cleared. What had been a single, sudden act of violence became something the neighborhood carried together, day after day. By March, the response had grown large enough to fill a concert hall, when musicians and organizers gathered for a benefit held in his memory.
The Books Details
Who benefits from sales of the book
Proceeds from the book benefit the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota.
Inside the book
Photographs from the scene, the vigils, and the memorial sit alongside transcripts, 911 calls, and official communications — primary materials left to speak for themselves.
The photojournalism
More than a year of protest and civic life across the Twin Cities, from intimate vigils to citywide demonstrations.
The story
What happened on Nicollet Avenue, and what it set in motion.
Pre-order the book
Agency & Resilience is a photojournalism book from Trench, co-director and director of photography on the award-winning documentary Dodging Bullets: Stories from Survivors of Historical Trauma. Proceeds from the book benefit the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota.
164 pages · $44.98 · ISBN 979-8-234-10430-4 · Library of Congress Control Number: 2026916507
Press & media
Fact sheet, book facts, and author photo for journalists and bookstores.
AI statement
No photographs in this book were manipulated using artificial intelligence software or applications. Image adjustments were limited to standard photographic processing — exposure, contrast, color, and cropping. No content was added, removed, or altered.