In December 2025, Christopher Anderson made headlines with his editorial for Vanity Fair: a journalistic commission presenting the Trump administration “without making it look good or bad, simply by shooting with honesty and reflection,” the photographer wrote on Instagram. In his images, close-up faces haunt us, bellies spill over tailored suits, flags crease, eyes widen, brows knit. Beneath the surface, Anderson performed a duty of candour, far removed from the smoothing effect of a hypocritical distance. A duty that unsettles: “I found it shocking that the whole world expects reality to be removed from an image.”
As pressure mounted to reveal key information in the Epstein case—implicating the American president—Donald Trump began the new year with a show of force: the capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, on January 3. The world’s leading power openly mocked international law, social networks erupted, and Trump supporters sang his praises. In the streets of Minneapolis, Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good were killed by ICE immigration police, followed by six more deaths in just one month, as reported by The Guardian on January 28. On TikTok, video edits of Gregory Bovino, head of ICE, compared his uniform to those of the Gestapo, while MAGA supporters declared, during street interviews, that they would prefer a dictatorship under Trump to a presidency under Biden.
Everywhere, visual testimonies contradict one another. The government appropriates amateur footage to impose its rhetoric and stifle civilian narratives—powerless yet furious in the face of police violence. For photographers, documenting this escalation has become essential—properly. With their cameras, Brandon Tauszik, Joseph Rushmore and Marcel Top venture into protests, funeral vigils and the archives of official communication campaigns to capture this shift and attempt to make sense of the advance of a new kind of authoritarianism.
Violence within the ordinary
“Distance is an integral part of ICE’s operating procedure. Their raids are fast, opaque and deliberately difficult to document. Agents often wear civilian clothing, drive unmarked vehicles and leave quickly. By the time communities or the media are alerted, they are usually already gone. All of this is intentional,” Brandon Tauszik reminds us. Living just a few blocks from the first immigration raids in Los Angeles, the photographer had no choice but to begin documenting events “happening at [his] doorstep”—an instinctive reaction to unexpected violence.
In October, Belgian visual artist Marcel Top, whose work focuses on ideology and systems of control, came across a video of agents arresting immigrants, edited to the theme music of Pokémon. “The contrast between form and content was disturbing, it immediately unsettled me,” he recalls. “As I kept researching, I discovered recurring patterns: specific sound selections, fonts and visual effects that echo contemporary internet culture to spread far-right messages—more specifically, white nationalist ones.” A stream of posts designed to shift violence into the realm of the ordinary—or even entertainment. Worse still, the artist points to a form of contemporary propaganda, using VHS filters and low-quality recordings to make official government content look like amateur reels.
By manipulating distance in this way, the Trump administration dampens visceral reactions to unjustified brutality. “But what should we think of a country that can watch a video of a secret service agent killing someone without any consensus that shooting a person three times is undeniably reprehensible?” asks Joseph Rushmore. For the Texas-based photographer, who has been documenting the consolidation of the far right in the United States for several years, the murder of Charlie Kirk was a decisive moment in this process. At his funeral, he “observed no sense of closeness among the 100,000 people who had come to pay their respects—yet they were all there.” A visible coldness perhaps born of the Trump administration’s tendency to erode empathy. “I am drawn to the distance that violence creates within a society, to the hatred it weaves between people and that grows when conspiracy takes hold and shared understanding disappears.”
In the face of a rising national hardness—encouraged by social networks whose content numbs us to horror—the role of photographers becomes indispensable. “Despite the collapse of the media, photojournalism and reporting feel even more urgent today. There is less infrastructure and fewer resources, that’s true, but also more space to tell stories outside official narratives,” Brandon Tauszik says.
A response to extremism
But when the subject one addresses “is proliferating and already photographed from every angle,” as Joseph Rushmore notes, how can it exist beyond a few seconds of scrolling? “I try to imagine the role my images might play for the people who will look at them in fifty years, rather than those who see them now,” he tells. A vision that frees him from overly literal interpretations, allowing him to search for what remains invisible—even to himself at first glance.
At Charlie Kirk’s funeral, the bodies he photographs emerge from a kind of mist, erasing any sense of space. The figures stand alone, their faces frozen in emotion—almost theatrical, unreal. Beneath the surface, Rushmore seems to turn the strategy of distance back against those who perpetuate it. Decontextualized, his portraits verge on the absurd, on uncanny strangeness: the inhuman within a subject that, paradoxically, is human.
Brandon Tauszik, for his part, turns his camera toward those who oppose, who protest, who fight the surrounding brutality and racism. In the heart of demonstrations, using flash, he freezes gestures of solidarity, flags—American and Palestinian alike—and placards that alternately mock and demand. From his work emerges an antithesis to ICE raids: “Here, everything is public, collective, meant to be seen. When thousands of Los Angeles residents take to the streets for weeks, it creates a visceral sense of closeness,” he says.
For Marcel Top, finally, distance protects the message. “I prefer method and restraint to escalation.” Conceived as a memorial meant to demonstrate the culpability of a government that would refuse to acknowledge it, his series “We Will Not Be Stopped” uses smartphone screens to re-display scanned, isolated and fragmented photographs and excerpts from official communications. Capsules revealing the indoctrination of citizens numbed to compassion. “Although I keep a complete archive of the original posts, it was important that the work itself never present the images in full. Showing the raw material would risk reproducing and amplifying the very message the project seeks to examine,” he explains.
By reversing the relationship to distance, photographers make room for reflection. In a polarized landscape where content is designed to be binary, easy to consume and absorb, they choose instead to trust the viewer, inviting them to look beyond the obvious. Only then, perhaps, will it become possible to recognize the mechanisms of propaganda, ethical blind spots and aesthetic shortcuts that have become the hallmark of “a government and a world drifting toward authoritarian politics,” as Brandon Tauszik describes it. “Fascists destroy nuance, beauty and splendor, and my work is affected by that, because it reads as a response to it: a hope of glimpsing love and light amid oppression and pain,” Joseph Rushmore concludes.
