Talking Pictures: Flowers, Leeks and Riot Shields

One shot, three forces, and a flower between the riot shields.

Street protest. Buenos Aires, Argentina. April 2025.

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The Pope had just died. You could tell by the way the flags sagged. Half-mast across official buildings, draped in the forced solemnity of institutional mourning. Outside the Monumento a Alfredo Palacios - named for Argentina’s first socialist senator - there was a group of school kids eating chips in the shade and an old woman scolding a dog that was refusing to move. It would’ve felt like any other weekday in Buenos Aires if not for the sound.

Further down the avenue, something was gathering. Drums, voices, a bass line of wheels rumbling over uneven concrete. Not urgent, exactly, but insistent. We followed it, like you do, curious but casual. Then we saw them.

People in motion.

People with vegetables.¹

This wasn’t May Day. That was still a week away. This was 23 April, and whatever it was, it was real.

There’s a strange choreography to street life in Buenos Aires. It’s as if protest, tourism, and architecture are all sharing the same sidewalk and refusing to give way. Turn left, you’re in a bookstore. Turn right, you’re in a march. Look up; there’s a flag at half mast for a Pope who never came back to his homeland. Look down; someone’s handing out lettuce.

And in the middle of it all: a police presence so theatrical it managed to feel both absurd and completely believable.

We hadn’t gone looking for it. But once you’re there, you have to choose: do you walk past, or do you witness?

The Verdurazo is not, on the surface, an especially dramatic protest. There are no chants, no burning effigies, no face-offs with mounted officers. It’s a quiet act of defiance by agricultural workers, small-scale producers and land collectives. People who grow things. People who eat last. They arrive with vegetables in plastic tubs and crates, some wrapped in blankets, some held like babies. They give the food away, publicly, for free.² It’s protest as redistribution. It’s what happens when the state cuts subsidies, kills credit, floods the market with imports, and tells you to be grateful for the inflation.

The crowd was mostly older women, a few students, a scattering of journalists, and a couple of well-worn trade unionists leaning against the barricades like they’d seen this film before. Just a simple union banner and the things they had: parsley, carrots, onions, their own bodies.

Then came the visual whiplash. Rows of police in full black tactical gear. Helmets, batons, plastic shields, body armour. Behind them, tucked in every side street for blocks, military buses with wire cages. Like something from the dictatorship museum further up the road. If this was a standoff, it wasn’t a fair one. One side had eggplants. The other had shotguns.

I was shooting deliberately, trying to capture that imbalance in a single frame. I’d hung back slightly, letting Jen and Ezra drift closer to the action. Ezra’s nearly six foot and built like a key backman. Even Henry, a little more nervous, cuts a noticeable beanpole shape. Our kids are on the cusp of adulthood now, taller, broader, visibly not local. In moments like this, they’re easier to spot than I’d like.

I was looking for the intersection: protester, cop, press photographer. Found them. Took the shot.

And for a moment, everything held still.

It’s one of those images that doesn’t announce itself until later. At the time, I was scanning. Watching for patterns, convergences, contradictions. The kind of frame where elements might lock into place for just long enough to matter. And then it was there. A woman in full riot gear (I think), face obscured, standing rigid beside a press photographer with a Canon across her chest, who was walking calmly, almost indifferently, through the crowd. Between them, a cluster of marchers carrying buckets and shopping bags. One with a flower.

The composition wasn’t clean. It wasn’t meant to be. I wanted the tension. Movement in the middle ground, surveillance at the edges, and something domestic straining to be seen. Protesters with leeks, cabbages, thermoses. The press, sharp-eyed and practiced. The police officer, unmoving, unreadable. All three part of the same civic ballet.

There’s a rhythm to it: left to right, footfalls and purpose. But there’s also a sense of absurdity. The tactical gear alone looked heavier than most of the protesters. Helmets. Shields. Gloves with extra knuckle protection. For what? A woman handing out lettuce?

There’s a particular kind of violence that doesn’t require contact. Just presence. Just standing there, too armed, too close. That kind of shot, not the photographic kind, the implied one, sat just behind the visor and the stillness.

And in the middle of it all, the camera. Hers and mine. Watching each other, not quite watching.

I wasn’t scared. Not exactly. But I was alert. Shooting in a foreign country where the police are armed to the teeth and bored enough to make a point demands a kind of bodily split. Part of you composing. The other part listening for raised voices, changes in movement, the sudden rush of a line shifting.

Two other coppers had started moving in my direction just before I took the shot. Not directly, but with enough purpose to tighten the gut. I didn’t linger. I rarely do when the gear outweighs the threat. I got what I needed. Click. Breathe. Move.

There’s also the fact of family. Jen and Ezra were up ahead, near the marchers. Henry behind me, grounded and sharp, his eyes everywhere. his instincts are for caution. But still, there’s something about photographing in that space, between the domestic and the dangerous, that sharpens the senses. You start doing the maths. How long until they notice? How far to the nearest corner? What happens if this goes sideways?

It didn’t. Not that time. The police stayed still. The protesters kept moving. The cameras kept watching.

And later, looking back, I kept returning to one small detail I hadn’t noticed at the time. Not the shotgun. Not the buses. Not the helmet.

The flower.

Held loosely, like a minor offering. Or a weapon, if you know how symbols work.

Everything in this frame was doing a job. The camera, the cop, the light, the Canon strap, the crate of vegetables. Even the footpath is working overtime, throwing up fragments of shadow and footstep, grounding the scene in that particular Buenos Aires blend of theatricality and decay. The protest moved diagonally through the frame. The police officer - black-armoured and faceless - stood still. The press photographer moved opposite, alert but unfazed. Between them, the crowd flowed like something unspooled: plastic tubs, hands clasped, shoulders turned just so.

I shot it from eye level, not because I was trying to be neutral, but because it was the only ethical angle left. No glorifying the people, no demonising the state. Just the act of seeing. And recording. And refusing to flinch.

Technically, it’s a clean shot. Exposed to the mid-tones, detail intact from the glint of the photographer’s badge to the soft crease of a child’s purple backpack. There’s no trick of light. No tilt-shift, no cinematic blur, no luring the eye toward a false centre. I trusted the elements to do their work. Trusted the texture of the scene - the body armour and flower stems, the polyester backpacks and taut plastic tubs - to carry the story.

There’s no negative space here. No escape hatch. The image is crowded because the street was crowded. Because the air was crowded. Because history doesn’t always leave room for symmetry or elegance. You’re in the thick of it, whether you want to be or not.

That’s what I kept thinking. This is not a spectacle. This is not a moment that exists to be aestheticised or framed. This is a record of a thing that happened. A group of people showed up to feed strangers in a city that treats them like a burden. And a different group showed up with batons and tear gas kits, not to stop them, but to make sure they knew who was in charge.

And still, the protest kept moving.

This isn’t a story about hope. Not really. It’s about proximity. The distance between a baton and a tub of potatoes. The gap between institutional power and communal need. The flower in the shot wasn’t symbolic. It was just something someone was carrying, on the way home, after trying to do something that mattered.

Later, we walked on. Jen and Ezra rejoined us near the corner where the protest had begun to dissolve. Henry was already ahead, paused by a bakery window that had nothing we needed but smelled good anyway. The flags were still at half-mast. The Pope was still dead. And the buses with their welded cages still hadn’t moved.

It wasn’t until that evening, back in our hotel room, looking at the photo on a small Surface Pro screen, that I realised how little had changed in the past fifty years. The architecture shifts. The riot gear upgrades. Governments rebrand. But the posture holds. One group marches. One group watches. One holds cameras. One holds guns. And occasionally, someone carries a leek.

Photography’s changed, of course. I’m shooting digital now, not film. There’s no contact sheet, no developer tray, no chemical smell clinging to your skin hours later. But the logic still holds. You wait for a moment, frame it clean, and trust the light. The technique - honest technique - doesn’t care about the format.

The frame I took that day carries no centre. It’s a triadic composition: press, police, protest. A choreography of tension rather than clarity. The eye is bounced and redirected: drawn to the armour, then the camera, then the quiet movement of women hauling food in plastic tubs. It’s not a photograph that tells you what to feel. It just demands that you keep looking.

I shot it from eye level. A democratic perspective. No exaltation, no condemnation. Just embedded observation. Participant and witness. The kind of shot where the depth of field is generous, where nothing gets blurred out for aesthetic convenience. Everything in focus. Everything sharp. Because everything matters.

I exposed to the mid-tones: deliberate, balanced, unmanipulated. No blown whites. No crushed blacks. Just a clean histogram and a city holding its breath. It’s not flashy, but it’s honest. You can see the difference in the flower stem, in the worn sole of a sneaker, in the glint on the press badge. Every pixel says: this happened.

That’s the thing about photography, even now. It doesn’t solve anything. It doesn’t feed anyone. But when it’s done right, it doesn’t flinch. And neither should you.

We flew to Santiago a few days later. May Day was coming. So were the drums.

1. This was the “Movilización y Verdurazo”. A public act of resistance by small-scale food producers, farm workers and land cooperatives. They came to denounce the economic wrecking ball swung by President Javier Milei and his allies. With subsidies slashed, credit evaporated and imports flooding markets, these producers are being pushed out of the food system.

2. The verdurazo - a giveaway of vegetables in public squares - is both survival strategy and political statement. If the government abandons you, you feed your neighbours.