Agency & Resilience is a work of documentary photojournalism chronicling the aftermath of the Alex Pretti shooting and the 74 days of community response that followed on the streets of Minneapolis.

On January 24, 2026, Alex Pretti — a 37-year-old ICU nurse, a lawful gun owner with no criminal history — was shot by federal agents on Nicollet Avenue while coming to the aid of a bystander who had been pushed to the ground during an immigration enforcement operation. What happened next became one of the most sustained expressions of civic grief and resistance in the city's history. Vigils. Marches. Memorials that grew and were rebuilt. Neighbors who kept showing up, week after week, refusing to let the moment pass unwitnessed.

Trench was there with his camera. Across 164 pages of unflinching photographs, Agency & Resilience documents not a single event but a duration — the way a community metabolizes loss, organizes anger into purpose, and insists on being seen. These are images of candlelight and cardboard signs, of faces in cold Minnesota air, of the ordinary people who make up an extraordinary response.

The book is framed at the intersection of two formidable thinkers on photography: Susan Sontag, who questioned whether images of suffering numb us or move us, and Susie Linfield, who argued in The Cruel Radiance that photographs of political violence can be acts of solidarity rather than exploitation. Agency & Resilience takes up their debate in practice — asking what it means to watch, to record, and to act when a man was killed for the simple decency of helping someone in front of him.

A Minneapolis-based photojournalist and documentary filmmaker whose work has appeared on PBS, Amazon Prime, and Apple TV and in Gannett publications including USA Today, Trench brings nearly a decade of protest photography — tens of thousands of frames made since 2017 — to this account of his own city.

Readers of this book will find:

• Documentary photography from 74 days of vigils, marches, and memorials in Minneapolis

• A visual record of community response to federal immigration enforcement

• An engagement with the ethics of witnessing, in the tradition of Sontag and Linfield

• A portrait of a city — its neighborhoods, its winters, its people — in a moment of reckoning

Agency & Resilience is for readers of photobooks and photojournalism, for those who follow questions of civil liberties and immigration policy, and for anyone who believes that paying attention is a form of action.

Trench is an award-winning cinematographer and photojournalist whose work lives at the crossroads of documentary practice and visual storytelling. His images and films have appeared on PBS, Amazon Prime, and Apple TV, and in Gannett publications including USA Today.

Across more than three decades behind the camera, in film, television, and editorial photography, he has covered subjects ranging from presidential campaigns to the Rolling Stones, and has produced hundreds of interviews in the health care arena and for EarthSayers, including conversations with Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland, environmental policy leader Judith Enck, and a series of interviews on witnessing with author Paul Hawken.

Trench began photographing political protests in 2017. That long-running documentary practice, nearly a decade of work in the streets of the Twin Cities and beyond, is the foundation of Agency & Resilience, his first photojournalism book.

He is the co-director and director of photography of the feature documentary Dodging Bullets: Stories from Survivors of Historical Trauma, which earned:

• Best of Fest at the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival
• The Samuel Sprynczynatyk Storyteller Award for Best Documentary Feature
• Best Cinematography at the Covellite International Film Festival
• The Audience Award at the Queen City Film Festival
• Best Documentary at the Bigfork Film Festival

His broader career spans film and still imagery, motion graphics, and editing, with images and productions appearing through clients and outlets including Rolling Stone, PBS, Gannett, and Prince's bands, alongside Fortune 500 companies, universities, and nonprofits.

Whether photographing artists in Minneapolis or documenting historic events as they unfold, Trench approaches every frame with the same conviction: that bearing witness is active work, and that a photograph can hold a moment in front of us long enough that it cannot be looked away from.

Trench is a producer and director based in Minnesota.