Agency & Resilience: Witnessing the Aftermath of the Alex Pretti Shooting in Minneapolis
About The Book
Some photographs are meant to stay with you. Susan Sontag argued that the hardest images to look at do something essential precisely because they’re hard to look at — they hold up evidence of what people are willing to do to one another, sometimes without hesitation, sometimes with conviction. They ask us not to turn away.
Agency & Resilience was built on that idea.
What this book is
On the morning of January 24, 2026, two federal Customs and Border Protection agents shot and killed Alex Pretti on Nicollet Avenue. Trench was there that morning, and in the weeks that followed, documenting what happened and what came after.
This is not an argument. It’s a record. Photographs from the scene, from the vigils, from the memorial, from the concert that turned a street corner into something that refused to go quiet — alongside transcripts, 911 calls, press statements, and official communications. The primary materials are left to speak for themselves. The work was making sure they could be seen, and making sure they’d still be legible once the moment had passed.
Why the Events of Operation Metro Surge matters
Trench’s career has circled back, again and again, to communities marked by institutional violence — the long aftermath, the slow reckoning, the place where history and the present collide. This story belongs to that same lineage. Bearing witness isn’t a passive act. It’s how people stop being able to look away. It’s the mechanism — not the metaphor — by which distance collapses and information becomes something closer to reckoning.
That’s what happened on that corner. People showed up with phones, with flowers, with signs they made by hand, not knowing exactly what to do with what they were feeling. Many had never stood on a street corner like that before in their lives. They came anyway, and something in them — and in the place itself — changed because of it.
Agency & Resilience is built around that instinct: the conviction that someone has to see this, and someone has to make sure it isn’t forgotten.
164 pages · Photojournalism · ISBN 979-8-234-10430-4 Published by EarthSayers. Distributed by Itasca Books. Proceeds benefit the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota.
