A ‘bird of Mexico City’ strikes a revolutionary pose: Pieter Henket’s best photograph

‘This project is about young people being free’ … La Mujer from the series Birds of Mexico, by Pieter Henket. Photograph: Pieter Henket

I took this picture, called La Mujer [The Woman], on the very first day of a project called Birds of Mexico City. I remember thinking, in that moment, that this is one of those rare pictures where you know immediately something special is happening.

But the story really began earlier, with a project called Birds of New York. During the first Trump administration, people were being so negative about New York, saying: “It’s not interesting any more. Young people are not doing anything.” And yet we kept seeing these very beautiful kids. I said to my husband Roger [Inniss]: “These kids are like birds. I wish I had been free like them when I was a young teenager in the Netherlands. They don’t care about what people think about them.”