Caught My Eye: Minneapolis; Copenhagen; Maputo; Manhattan

State violence. Portraits, not penguins. Climate supercharged. The wealth divide with a sparkle.

Times like these—from state violence in Minneapolis, to Trump’s manufactured crisis over Greenland—demand we bear witness in real time. As most of you know, I have a weakness for long-form, a liability when urgency and the scarcity of people actually reading the pictures both call for speed. This new feature, Caught My Eye, is my attempt to stay present and respond with the turnaround these incredible images and events require.

Minneapolis: Escalation and Grief

I’m working on a longer post on the new civil war. In the meantime, let me share.

A protester has a chemical irritant sprayed directly into his face in Minneapolis on January 21, 2026. Richard Tsong-Taatarii/The Minnesota Star Tribune/Getty Images

Evidence of escalation as much as brutality, this photo—featured on the front page of the Minnesota Star Tribune—was taken three days before federal agents killed Alex Pretti. After an ICE agent shoved a cyclist, a crowd of bystanders and protesters surged forward, shouting at the agents, who responded by tackling demonstrators to the pavement and spraying this man point-blank with a chemical irritant.

More than any photo I’ve seen, this captures the political intent and psychic drive behind the Trump administration’s war on sanctuary cities: domestic terror and pure sadism.

A woman cries at the makeshift memorial for Alex Pretti on January 24. Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

Evelyn Hockstein’s photo lays bare Minnesota’s grief over the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and the violent occupation of their city. The mascara running down her face makes the heartbreak unbearably immediate, while those heart-shaped glasses, the peace-and-love aesthetic straight out of the ‘60s, connect this moment of anguish to another generation’s resistance to war and state violence.

Denmark, Greenland, and the Mockery that is White House Media

Hillary Swift’s portraits from Copenhagen are everything the White House’s AI garbage isn’t: human, dignified, real. Swift captures the faces of Danes—veterans, artists, ordinary citizens—grappling with Trump’s threats to seize Greenland. You see their shock, their resolve, the weight of betrayal by a supposed ally.

Then look at what the White House posted from Davos: AI-generated caricatures that turn the crisis, Trump’s gaslighting and threats, into propaganda poster kitsch. It’s contempt on every level—for the Danes and the Greenlanders whose sovereignty hangs in the balance, for the notion that foreign policy deserves anything more than comic book panels and burlesque, and for visual communication itself.

Warming Overhead

Aurelio Justino Zitha, 68, stands in floodwater in his property after weeks of heavy rainfall in Maputo, Mozambique, January 21. Amilton Neves/Reuters

Water rises ankle‑deep inside a room that already looks half‑submerged in paint, the blue strokes on the walls reading now as tides and currents instead of decoration. The window is jammed with plastic chairs, absurdly suspended between inside and out, like improvised floodgates. Even the mosquito net, bundled uselessly high on the wall, reads as a white flag; the tools people once used to manage their environment are no match for an atmosphere that has slipped its bounds.

I don’t entirely grasp the physics in this frame either, but I recognize the politics: this warped little room in the global South is what it looks like when Trump yanks the U.S. out of climate pacts while fantasizing about strip‑mining a thawing Arctic and carving up Greenland. Do you think he’d have such designs on that ice if the shrinking polar caps weren’t opening new seams for mining and shipping, the same effect that is now supercharging the brutal snow and ice gripping half the country?

Suffering Cha-ching

How sad is the ad fed to this New York Times article? The juxtaposition perfectly captures how a piece about ‘brisk’ Goodwill sales in a shaky economy gets framed for the comfort of the well‑off. Set against a luxury‑jewelry banner, the thrift racks and bargain hunters become scenery in a matter-of-fact business story, and the pairing all but turns both into poverty porn.

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