Chinese tea · one word, full width
Thirty-four Chinese teas photographed on black from directly above, each one a single heap under a heavy grotesque word stretched from edge to edge. Nothing else enters the frame.
8 teas · 5 categories
The whole layout is two objects — a word and a thing — and it refuses a third. The word is set in a heavy grotesque and tracked until it fills the measure, so it reads as a bar of ink rather than a name, which means the eye finishes with it fast and drops to the leaf. The leaf is lit from above on black, so the only colour in the frame comes out of the tea itself: the amber edges of pressed cha gao, the copper stems in a knot of lao cha tou. Chinese tea survives this treatment because it already has the shape for it — most of it arrives pressed, rolled or knotted into forms that hold together in a pile. The caption stays on one line and carries both the romanised and the Chinese name, because those two are the whole label and anything more would be decoration. Inverted to paper and black type, the same page works as the retail face, and the emptiness reads as room rather than absence.