<<Story, images, etc all solely by Jenny/ Jennifer>>
It’s no secret that this year has started out a bit rough (*understatement of the century) in these first 5 months of the year/ start of a new presidential tenure here in the United States. Though Nazis would call for Nationalism at any cost & slam our (Americans’) critiques, I am no bigoted nationalist, though I am an American citizen who believes that it is patriotic to exercise and call for the freedom of speech, human rights, and the right to privacy. I’ll keep the writing brief as the images speak for themselves, but here’s a quick description of some of the intense local happenings last month:
Here in South Bend, Indiana and the entire Michiana (Michigan/ Indiana) area we started the month of April off with a small tornado. Many folks that I know personally texted and wrote me to tell me that they had no warning whatsoever about the sudden and violent storm and that they or their loved ones/ neighbors suffered from destruction of their homes, their cars, the oldest/ tallest trees on their properties, or their businesses. One pal from Granger described how she, her husband, and their kids had had no idea that the storm was coming and had just walked out of their living room together as their large outdoor trampoline came smashing violently into their house loudly shattering the windows of said living room to clear across the entire room (and into their kids’ toys and belongings).
I went out immediately after the quick, violent tornado (the likes of which I’d never experienced in my immense amount of experiences with natural disasters) and folks were already out helping each other cut back ancient, massive trees which had fallen across the road that Sunday evening. After chatting in the road with many staring in shock at the damage on their property (all stating that they’ve never in their entire Boomer dad lives experienced anything like it) I hopped in my car to drive to check out more as it was exactly sunset. Pulling around massive heaving trees in the dark left an overwhelming gut feeling almost unlike anything I’ve ever experienced - other than maybe walking up under the Eiffel Tower in Paris by myself for the first time or standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon as a young adult with gnarly food poisoning. The next morning I set out to capture trees around my city, but felt hopping out to capture massive trees lodged in the middle of peoples’ homes too exploitative (*as I’m not a formal news channel), so I instead opted to capture damage in the form of mostly massive, ancient fallen trees in a smaller 1,000 person Michigan town. Here are those images:
Last month (April 2025) also continued to see more massive large-scale protests across the United States and world. These were (and continue to be) some of the most patriotic & largest in scale that I’ve ever seen over the past 11 years in my experience of unpaid protest professional photography from California to the Midwest (over an hour East of Chicago). I will break these protests (*as well as historic Indiana governmental meetings with citizens & largest mega corporation investments in Indiana history) into two separate blog posts for sheer amount of imagery that I captured.
Though not as astronomical as this week’s 30 miles of around 15,000 protestors over the weekend spanning from Chicago to a suburb, this particular protest in South Bend, Indiana was comprised of over 2,000 protestors all the way down the state road from one of the many universities- St. Mary’s- to down past Holy Cross College and all the way down to the old location of my alma mater high school (St. Joseph High School) & The University of Notre Dame’s campus just one minute from downtown South Bend. Folks protested many things, but mainly “hands off” many important institutions, careers, financials, and more in our nation set to be gutted- something that Trump & minions are currently trying to chip away at with their proposed “Big Beautiful Bill” (massive cuts to nearly everything to cover tax cuts for the mere <800> billionaires who have continued to be prioritized over the other 340 MILLION of us). This was definitely one of the largest protests I’ve professionally photographed, so after a year & a half of completely insane in-person & online harassment and intimidation both in public, at my own house, while photographing clients, and from hacked technology, I did tear up with hope & pride while merely trying to find parking amidst the massive crowds. Onto my imagery:
Thanks so much for reading along and checking out these images captured & edited by Jenny. Part 2 of more protests from the past month as well as Jenny-captured images & information from one of the meetings on one of the proposed 30 AI data centers for the state of Indiana to come.
If you’d like to be patriotic and care about the people, animals, nature, workers, or anything in your state/ nation and don’t know how to contribute, you can easily head to https://5calls.org/ (or the app also called “5 Calls” ) and you will be prompted to type in your city/ state so that from there you can see the issues at hand and click to call the appropriate government official about each issue that you’re interested in fighting for (*or against)-! (*Trust me: It’s actually very easy, interesting, and not scary-!)