He saw that the rally to reopen businesses shut down by the COVID-19 pandemic was transitioning from speeches at the plaza to a march to the Arizona state Capitol across the street.

Arizona Republic photographer Michael Chow, wearing a tight-fitting N95 mask, sprinted ahead of the crowd. And that’s when he saw the nurses.

The five nurses were in scrubs and wearing N95 masks of their own. They stood in the crosswalk of 17th Avenue and faced the oncoming protesters.

Chow focused his attention on one nurse in particular. There was something about her stance, her posture. While other nurses had their arms at their sides, this nurse had her arms crossed and looked defiant.

“I stayed put and I waited,” Chow said. “For the right person, the right moment.”

Chow, who has been a photographer with The Republic and its now-defunct afternoon sister paper, The Phoenix Gazette, since 1989, had adopted a technique while shooting photos. He keeps both eyes open. With one, he sees through the viewfinder; with the other he sees peripherally what’s coming.

Chow saw a man walking up to the nurse, heartily waving a flag.

He snapped.

That image would be seen by at least a million people in the coming days. It was shared across the internet, picked up by other news outlets, including CNN. Chow was approached by The Guardian in London to talk about the photo.

It would encapsulate the struggle between both the scientific and medical communities advocating prolonged social distancing to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus and those who feel the dangers of the disease are overblown and want shutdowns lifted and the country beginning a return to normal.

The man in the photo has not been identified.

The woman has. She is Lauren Leander, a nurse who volunteered to work 12-hour shifts at the COVID-19 unit of Banner University Medical Center in Phoenix, located about four miles away from the State Capitol.

Leander, in an interview with The Republic this week, said she went to the protest because she was inspired by similar silent protests by other medical workers at other rallies to reopen cities’ economies. She said she was accused at the rally of being an actor posing as a nurse. Or maybe a nurse who worked for a dentist’s office or an abortion clinic.

Leander said while people shouted insults at her, she struggled to stay silent. And, for the most part, she did.

That included when Chow approached her after he captured the image. He asked her name and whether she was a nurse. She didn’t answer. She would be identified on the front page of Tuesday’s Republic as simply a health care worker.

'No picture is worth getting hurt'

Chow had gone to cover Monday’s event, billed as a Patriot’s Day Rally, under strict orders from his boss.

The Republic's senior visuals editor, Michael Meister, told him to wear protective equipment. He told Chow to stay safe.

“No picture is worth you getting hurt or sick,” Meister said he told Chow. It was a mantra he has repeated to all the photographers and videographers in the department who have been capturing visuals in these weeks of a spreading pandemic.

Chow had covered another rally at the Capitol on Sunday. That rally, billed as Operation Gridlock, had people mainly driving in their cars around the Capitol.

But Chow knew Monday’s rally would be different. These would be people walking about and a good number of those attending would likely not be wearing masks or practicing social distancing. An underlying theme of the event was that the virus wasn’t to be feared.

Chow kept his distance as he covered the speeches near a rented firetruck at Wesley Bolin Plaza.

Then there was an announcement. Rallygoers would march across the street and surround the Capitol buildings.

Chow reached the crosswalk before the crowd. He saw the five nurses lined up in the median between the lanes of traffic. He captured that image.

Then he focused on the nurse with her arms crossed

He lined up his camera to capture her posture. He just needed someone passing by to fill in the left side of the frame.

Several candidates walked by, Chow said. Then came the man with the flag. Chow clicked his shutter several times.

He decided to move on. He wanted to catch up to the protesters.

He shot images outside the Capitol buildings. He heard people in the crowd saying they wanted to get to the office of Gov. Doug Ducey.

The crowd headed around the north end of the building that houses Arizona’s executive branch.

Chow went to the south end. He was able to get inside the lobby before the crowd streamed inside. He figured he could still maintain a safe distance.

But he wouldn’t for long.

As more people crowded into the lobby, which was partitioned off by glass walls and guards standing near a metal detector, Chow found himself backed up and surrounded by people.

He lifted his camera to capture 17 seconds of video of the scene, then quickly sent it out on Twitter. So fast, he didn’t catch that the autocorrect feature had helpfully changed the governor’s last name from Ducey to Ducky.

He decided he had enough. He wanted out.

Finding the picture that resonated

Chow had been in situations involving tear gas, rubber bullets and wildfires.

“With those things, I feel like I have enough experience and street smarts to keep myself safe,” he said. “When you’re talking about an invisible virus, those street smarts aren’t going to help you.”

He also wanted to take off his N95 mask, which was giving him a headache, and scrub down his face, hands and arms.

Chow headed back to the Republic newsroom. With most of the news staff working at home, it was empty save for him and Meister.

Chow did a quick edit of the 2,017 images he had shot that afternoon, winnowing it down to what he thought were the best 29 shots.

He opened his laptop and, across a cubicle aisle, went through them with Meister.

When Chow got to the photo of the nurse and the protester, Meister remembered saying, “That is great.”

Chow was working quickly to assemble a gallery of photos for the newspaper’s website, azcentral. It was then that the photo first struck him as something especially poignant.

“That’s the one there,” he remembered thinking.

What made the image work was its simplicity, Meister remembered saying.

“It’s the body language of both people in the photo,” Chow said.

The man is not simply holding the flag, but gripping it, holding it tall. The nurse stares back, almost through him, with arms crossed.

Meister helped prepare the gallery for producers, who added the finishing touches and published it online, with the nurse and protester squaring off as the lead image.

The photo also appeared on the front page of Tuesday’s Republic, spread over three-fourths of the available width of the page.

The rest of Arizona and the world could see the photo. And see in it what they wanted.