

Disposable-camera photograph, short lens, close, hand-held and slightly crooked, at the height of a corner-shop chiller with a glass door. Other people's groceries crowd it above, below and either side — energy drinks, a sandwich in a wedge pack, a handwritten price card — dense enough to read as a real place rather than a set. Two kombucha bottles stand off centre among the stock, each one a different brand carrying a different style, the hero pack in heavy display lettering filled with a dense glitter or metallic-fleck texture, set very tight on one flat saturated colour, small technical copy ranged below with a flat starburst as its motif, outlined in a second colour, the name Brute, and a dense four-line ingredients run. Every colour on the pack is flat with a hard edge and the lettering is one flat colour. Direct on-camera flash: a hard bright hotspot on the nearest packs, a fast falloff to dark at all four corners, a hard flash shadow thrown behind whatever is closest. Visible film grain, slightly soft focus, a little chromatic fringing at the high-contrast edges, the colour pushed warm and contrasty the way a drugstore print is. The location's own colours blown warm, with the hero pack the one saturated thing on the shelf. Offhand and badly taken — caught on the way past rather than arranged.