Let's get canned

Overlooked spaces
London, ON
February 2026
This photo originally shared on Instagram

Nobody enjoys grocery shopping these days. It’s expensive and frustrating, and complete strangers still think it’s acceptable to spontaneously invade my personal space so they can beat me to the pickle display.

My coping mechanism is a familiar one: random acts of photography in weird corners of the store. Because in my world, pretty pictures - or even less-than-pretty ones - bring joy. Since I don’t ever want to be accused of being a self-absorbed pickle-picker, I work quickly and quietly in otherwise empty aisles. Or as empty as they can possibly be.

I scan the place for strange scenes and wait for my brain to decide on what’s worth shooting.

And on this particular afternoon, I find inspiration in the geometrically shadowy spaces behind the canned beet display. I figure it’s a part of the store most of us have never seen - likely because our heads are too big to fit between the shelves - so before long I’m wiggling my smartphone behind the randomly arranged cans in search of a workable angle.

Like so many photographic adventures of mine, this one doesn’t follow a logical roadmap. The universe doesn’t need a photo like this, and I’m reasonably sure you don’t either.

But the universe is a big, sometimes frightening place. So we seek solace in hidden oases where no one else would think to look.

The beets are a bit of a bonus.

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