Ryan Vizzions archives Renee Good memorial site artifacts

 Via The Minnesota Star Tribune

By Alicia Eler

March 3, 2026

Ryan Vizzions:  

January 7th, 2026 - After the murder of Renee Good by a masked federal agent, a vigil was held in her honor. Upward of 10,000 Minnesotans showed up to pay their respects at the location she was killed

What happens next depends on the family’s wishes.

Ryan Vizzions started collecting posters from the spontaneous public memorial that sprung up at the site of Renee Good’s killing. The traveling photographer appointed himself the site’s caretaker.

He also gathered many other items — a cookie jar filled with handwritten letters rolled into scrolls, letters addressed to Good’s family, a canvas covered with names of people killed by federal agents since 2025.

“All these are prayers,” Vizzions said. “These are things that people brought because they cared. We owe it to them to try and preserve them and save them and make it so the future can learn about what happened here.”

When it comes to archiving spontaneous public memorials, there are no clear pathways for what to do. The work is fluid, and caretakers volunteer because they feel called to do so. It’s all open-ended and grassroots; people write the rules as they go along. Even the city of Minneapolis doesn’t have timelines for what happens to memorials, city spokeswoman Jess Olstad said.

At Good’s site, it’s unknown where the gathered items will ultimately go, but community members are in contact with the Good family about next steps.

Vizzions initially rented a storage unit for the posters and other items, but moved them to a more secure undisclosed residential location in south Minneapolis.

“These sites emerge when the future feels uncertain and the past feels unfinished,” said Alex Pretti memorial site caretaker Jadah Green, 43, at a “Caring for Spontaneous Public Memorials After State Violence” panel discussion Feb. 27. “They are not permanent installations. They are not yet historical memory. They are living thresholds.”

Vulnerable memorials

Vizzions has been guarding, cleaning and organizing the site since the week after Good was killed. The site is vulnerable to changing weather and vandalism ― like when someone poured gasoline on it and lit a nearby pile of wood on fire Feb. 17.

The city doesn’t take care of the sites, but might help with cleanup or security. Caretakers do the daily work of talking to visitors, cleaning the site and keeping it beautiful.

Paul Eaves of Minneapolis helps out at George Floyd Square and the Pretti and Good memorial sites.

“It’s not about ego,” said Eaves, 77. “It’s about service.”

Minneapolis City Council Member Jason Chavez said he would like to see a permanent memorial for Good, but stressed that it’s up to the family, and it isn’t a decision that the city will or should make.

“I’ve heard from so many Latino neighbors, immigrant neighbors, about the courage that Renee Good had to look out for our community in a time when many of us feel like we have been sent back into the shadows,” said Chavez, who called the memorial a sacred space. “She brought light into this world.”

He wants caretakers and people affected by ICE to have a place “to mourn and celebrate Renee’s life, and a place where we can never forget what the federal government did and continues to do to our community.”

Vizzions’ favorite piece from the memorial is a painting on cardboard of Good in blue with the American flag.

“When we were doing the watch and we’d sit out there next to the fire, this one was facing us,” he said of painting. “For three weeks I stared at this piece.”

Vizzions raised more than $2,000 to pay for the storage space and equipment, including lights, backdrop, camera stands, tables, storage boxes and more.

In 2017, he published the photo book “No Spiritual Surrender: A Dedication to the Standing Rock Movement.”

He was in northern Minnesota on another project when he heard about Good’s killing. He drove down to Minneapolis and began camping out in front of the memorial in his van.

Through the process, he feels he’s become part of the community, and he’s contributing to the greater good.

The family’s decision

Rise & Remember Executive Director Jeanelle Austin said community members waited nearly two months to reach out to George Floyd’s family after his killing in 2020.

“You have to be able to give the families the time that they need to do all of the other things that take priority, and then when the family is ready, for them to decide what they want to do,” Austin said. “As caretakers, we’re keepers of the stories ― our job is not to make final decisions or final calls of what’s to come next.” --Full article with photographs

Landmark Settlement Announced in Lawsuit Challenging Unlawful Questioning of Journalists at the Border, including Gallery Photographer Bing Guan

 Via ACLU

Landmark Settlement Announced in Lawsuit Challenging Unlawful Questioning of Journalists at the Border

The settlement comes after five journalists were unlawfully targeted for and questioned about their reporting near the U.S-Mexico border

In a win for freedom of the press, the American Civil Liberties Union, the New York Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of San Diego, and Covington & Burling LLP announced a settlement today in a federal lawsuit challenging the unlawful targeting and questioning of five photojournalists at the U.S.-Mexico border. The lawsuit, filed in November 2019 in federal court in the Eastern District of New York against U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), claimed that border officials violated the journalists’ First Amendment rights. The journalists claimed that they were unconstitutionally targeted for secondary inspection, detention, and questioning by U.S. border officials on the basis of their reporting near the U.S.-Mexico border in 2018 and 2019. In March 2021, the district court denied the government’s motion to dismiss the case, holding that the plaintiffs had plausibly alleged that border officials violated their First Amendment rights. The case was settled in January 2026.

“The future of our democracy depends on the freedom of the press, now more than ever,” said plaintiff Bing Guan. “It’s clear the government’s actions were meant to instill fear in journalists like me, to cow us into standing down from reporting what is happening on the ground. After being targeted for doing just that, I am grateful for what our lawsuit has achieved in defending the rights of journalists to report free from government officials’ scrutiny.”

Full release here

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The People, United, Will Never Be Defeated: Leila Navidi’s Photograph as a Defining Image of Resistance to Trump’s ICE Regime

 Via Reading The Pictures

February 23, 2026

Heavily armed, masked federal immigration agents face a cluster of neighborhood residents filming them with their phones during an ICE operation that resulted in a car accident in St. Paul in January 2026. Leila Navidi/Minneapolis Star Tribune

A spontaneous ICE encounter on a St. Paul block becomes a rare picture of practiced solidarity—and a case study in how images can answer federal power.

By Michael Shaw

Leila Navidi’s photograph for the Minneapolis Star Tribune shows St. Paul neighbors on a Cathedral Hill sidewalk on February 11, 2026, standing shoulder to shoulder with their phones raised as militarized ICE agents turn away.

What began as a spontaneous response to a high‑speed crash caused by an ICE chase becomes, in her frame, a rare picture of collective solidarity—everyday residents forming a united front, documenting federal power, and quietly claiming the moral ground.

While the image went viral, little was written about why it had such an impact. In our latest Chatting the Pictures video, we read it detail by detail, to show how its composition, timing, and gestures have made it a breakthrough resistance picture for this state and this moment. Watch now:

More: The events that built this picture

"It’s absolutely imperative that the truth is documented.”

 Via El Pais

February 23, 2026

American photographer Carol Guzy, a four-time Pulitzer Prize winner, asserts that, in light of the brutal anti-immigration crusade being waged by the US government, the work of photojournalists ‘is more important than ever’

It was an unexpected flash of empathy. The woman’s husband had just been detained by immigration agents in a federal courthouse in Lower Manhattan, which has become the epicenter of the Donald Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in New York. Photographer Carol Guzy (Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 69) saw the agents take the man away as his wife shouted, “Please, help me!” and their two children cried. Guzy decided to accompany the family to the exit. There, the woman realized she didn’t have her keys; with no way to return home, she broke down in tears again. A court security officer approached her to offer help and, faced with the scene, also began to cry. Through her own tears, Guzy captured the moment with her camera.

For the photographer, it is an image that radiates compassion at a time when people desperately need it. In the midst of an unprecedented crusade against immigration, launched by a president obsessed with carrying out the largest deportation in U.S. history, the work of photojournalists like Guzy has become, in her own words, “more important than ever” in her country’s history. With their cameras, they are building a historical record that is at once deeply alive and profoundly human, documenting the consequences of an immigration policy whose effects will be felt for decades to come. --click for full article

“It’s our challenge in the face of the disinformation being disseminated, both for us as photographers and for these brave, brave residents who are standing out there with their cell phones documenting, like Alex Pretti. It’s absolutely imperative that the truth is documented.”

"A Globe Trotting Pioneer"

 Via The Association of International Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD) Exposure Newsletter

February 19, 2026

Margaret Bourke-White/©Life Picture Collection

Courtesy of Monroe Gallery

Louisville Flood Red Cross Relief Station, Kentucky, 1936

Margaret Bourke-White was a pioneer in many ways: a founding member of LIFE magazine, she was also the publication’s first female photographer, and she photographed the magazine’s first cover in 1936 (of the massive Fort Peck Dam in Fort Peck, Montana). A globe-trotting photojournalist (who was played in films by both Candace Bergen and Farrah Fawcett), she became a successful photographer in many male-dominated areas of the field, including industrial photography. When she was all of 23 years old, she photographed the Otis Steel Mill in Cleveland, where she also photographed the city’s famous Terminal Tower. Her 1937 landmark book, You Have Seen Their Faces, with text by her then-husband Erskine Caldwell, documented the lives of shareholders and tenant farmers in the deep south with empathy and grace. After embedding with the Air Force during World War II, she was one of the first people to photograph the devastation of the concentration camps, and her photographs of Gandhi following the partition of India were some of the last photographs ever taken of him before he was assassinated in 1948. A selection of this remarkable body of work is on view through April 26 at Santa Fe’s Monroe Gallery of Photography.
-Jean Dykstra

Margaret Bourke-White/©Life Picture Collection

Courtesy of Monroe Gallery

Gandhi walking with close advisors and family members, India, 1946

Ryan Vizzions Photographed Renee Good Memorial Site Arson

 Via Minnesota Star Tribune

February 18, 2026

Someone doused Renee Good’s south Minneapolis memorial and a nearby pile of wood with gasoline and started a fire at about 9 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 17.

A fence was charred, and several items in the memorial were damaged, but the memorial site at 34th Street and Portland Avenue wasn’t burned down. No one was injured, Minneapolis police said.

Photojournalist Ryan Vizzions, 43, smelled gasoline from inside his van, which was parked near the memorial site.

“I looked out my windshield and I see orange,” he said. “My eyes lit up.”

Vizzions jumped out of the van after seeing the flames. Neighbors who live in the apartment building in front of Good’s memorial used two fire extinguishers to put out the blaze, he said.

Community members had covered the memorial site with a tarp earlier to protect it from the rain.

“We’ve been hypervigilant in our neighborhood and obviously everyone’s keeping an eye out all of the time,” said Wren Clinefelter, 23, who lives near the memorial. “So it’s definitely very disheartening to hear that someone would try and burn down a memorial for a woman who was killed in our neighborhood.”

Vizzions posted a video of the scene to his Instagram account.

More with video reporting via WCCO on Facebook

Photojournalists documenting Trump’s deportation forces play critical role, but face increasing state violence

Via Prism

February 18, 2026

"Masked federal agents have abducted anyone they suspect of being a migrant—from workplaces, houses, courthouses, schools, and streets. ICE has forced its way into people’s homes with battering rams, dragged a pregnant woman through the snow, taken children as young as five into custody, and killed American citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.

And at every step, journalists have documented the rapidly escalating state violence—often at great risk to themselves. While covering ICE’s enforcement surge in Los Angeles, TV reporter Lauren Tomasi was live on air when a Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officer aimed his weapon directly at Tomasi at close range, hitting her with “nonlethal ammunition.” Photographer Nick Stern required emergency surgery after LAPD shot his thigh with a plastic bullet. In Chicago, an ICE agent shot a pepper ball into the parked car of reporter Asal Rezaei, and in New York, ICE agents shoved visual journalist L. Vural Elibol, causing a head injury that required emergency services.

Ryanne Mena, who covered the ICE raids for the Southern California News Group, was shot on June 6 in the left thigh with a pepper ball bullet. The following day, she was struck in the head with a rubber bullet and the reporter next to her was hit in the head with a tear gas canister. Mena, who has asthma, had difficulty breathing and bystanders helped the reporters flush their eyes with water.

“I spent the rest of that day with a grueling headache. I threw up later that night, and two days later I was diagnosed with a concussion,” said Mena, who noted that a half year later, her brain fog is just now starting to dissipate and that she continues to experience heightened anxiety.

In Minneapolis, freelance photographer John Abernathy was surrounded and tackled by immigration agents on Jan. 15. “They set off a flash bang and then tear gas,” he explained. “I was shot twice with pepper bullets in my leg. I was then surrounded by border police and taken to the ground where they sprayed me in the face with pepper spray. My face was on fire. My eyes were on fire. I was gasping and gagging. I ended up having multiple injuries from the pepper bullets, chemical burns in my eye, and abrasions from being taken down.”' --click for full article

"I asked journalists who have been covering the ICE raids in LA, Oakland, Chicago, and Minneapolis to share their advice on staying safe. Here’s what they said"

Inside the U.S. Immigration System with Nicolò Filippo Rosso - February 12, 2026

Via Seven Foundation

Since 2018, visual journalist Nicolo Filippo Rosso has been documenting migration across the Americas, photographing families across South and Central America as they make the difficult journey north to the United States in search of safety. By 2024, Nicolo reconnected with some in the United States. What they had imagined as the end of a dangerous journey had become a new cycle of fear and instability.

 

In the summer of 2025, Nicolo spent nearly every day inside the immigration courts of downtown Manhattan, where Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have detained numerous non-U.S. citizens attending court hearings. Many arrived under Temporary Protected Status or requested asylum at the border. They complied with the system, yet were still taken from the hallways, arrested, sent to distant detention centres, and placed on the path to deportation, either to their home countries or to third nations.

 

Hosted by Ron Haviv, the conversation will explore the deep divide in U.S. immigration policy, where demands for border control collide with calls for humanity, and discuss what effect these issues have on the democratic fabric of the country.

Register here

Visit Monroe Gallery At The Second Edition of Scottsdale Art Week March 19-22, 2026

Visit Monroe Gallery at the second edition of Scottsdale Art Week March 19-22, 2026. We will be located in booth G2, featuring a dynamic selection of photographs from Art Heals: The Jingle Dress Project by Eugene Tapahe. Also on exhibit will be a special selection of Tony Vaccaro's iconic photographs of Art and Fashion.

The four-Day International Art Fair Returns to WestWorld of Scottsdale This Spring With 120 Galleries From 15 Countries. With galleries from across the country and around the world converging and a slate of esteemed honorees ready to step into the spotlight, Scottsdale Art Week presented by Scottsdale Ferrari returns to WestWorld of Scottsdale March 19 – 22, 2026. It all kicks off with an Opening Night Vernissage Thursday, March 19, giving guests a glimpse of the art, awards, entertainment and cultural offerings awaiting them throughout the remaining three days of festivities.

The 2026 Opening Night Vernissage benefits Phoenix Art Museum, widely recognized as the preeminent and largest art museum in the Southwestern United States. The evening offers guests exclusive early access to view and acquire works on show ahead of the general public and will feature a fashion presentation of wearable art curated by Galina Mihaleva of Arizona State University’s FIDM.

Opening Night guests will also enjoy bars and pop-up restaurants in all four corners of the 120,000 square-foot North Hall of WestWorld, famous for annually hosting the Barrett-Jackson Collector Car Auction. They can also visit a Veuve Clicquot Restaurant & Bubble Bar and access a Stella Artois Sculpture Garden, the latter of which is available to Opening Night Vernissage attendees, exclusively.

More information here

I Was Arrested for Doing My Job as a Reporter. Who’s Next?

 Via The New York Times

by Georgia Fort

Ms. Fort is an independent journalist based in Minnesota.

February 5, 2026

"Journalism is a public service, and I am proud to be a public servant. Professional reporting, observing and documenting is not a crime. But the freedom to do so is at risk. In November alone, three journalists were hit with pepper balls or other less lethal munitions and subjected to chemical agents while covering an ICE arrest in St. Paul. One, a Minnesota Public Radio reporter, was taken away by ambulance. Cameras were rolling. Press credentials were visible but offered no protection. I interviewed the St. Paul chief of police about these attacks in December. He refused to acknowledge that the incidents had occurred, even though several journalists had filmed and photographed them, including me. I filed a Freedom of Information Act request a few days after the interview to obtain body-camera footage of the attack on these journalists. It was denied.

These incidents are not isolated. After the fatal shooting of Renee Good, the independent photographer KingDemetrius Pendleton was tear-gassed by federal agents and was apparently shot with a chemical munitions canister. The Star Tribune video journalist Mark Vancleave was pushed back into his car by federal agents after trying to report on an ICE arrest, which he was covering for The Associated Press. The KARE 11 anchor Jana Shortal was hit with a chemical irritant while reporting after the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti.

Having the right to film and document matters. Footage can disprove false accusations or confirm hard truths. It can exonerate or incriminate. Days after the church protest, Alex Pretti, an intensive care unit nurse, was fatally shot by ICE agents. In the minutes that followed, videos from multiple angles of the shooting were published online, and this allowed the public, the press and the authorities to review the evidence." --full article here.

Related: Free Speech in Deep Freeze