Open any restaurant’s feed and the meat looks the same. Shot from directly above, on slate or bare wood, lit evenly, cropped so tightly that nothing else survives in the frame. It is a solved problem, solved the same way every time. Painters worked on the same subject for four centuries and never once solved it that way. Raw meat has a long and strange career in European art, and the pictures it produced are far more inventive than anything a phone camera does with a rib of beef.

The magenta one is out of focus and it is still the first thing you see. That is the photograph’s problem and its solution simultaneously. The purple Phalaenopsis blooms sweep in from the left edge, large and unresolved, occupying a third of the frame as pure color mass. The eye registers saturation before it registers form. Then the yellow orchid asserts itself — fully sharp, cream petals with deep crimson-violet labella at each center, a closed bud still olive-green mid-stem, the whole spike curving through the frame in a line that reads as both botanical and architectural.