clarity, Techniscope film still with a bleach-bypass print, 35mm spherical at T4, silvery crushed blacks and desaturated colour, heavy grain, high resolution. An Assyrian woman of thirty-one, strikingly beautiful, with a long angular face, strong level dark brows, large hooded brown eyes, a prominent elegant nose, a defined cupid's bow and thick black hair cut blunt at the shoulder, stands halfway up a concrete stairwell with a plastic bag of shopping against her hip, stopping to look down as a door bangs shut below her. One glass-block window on the landing throws a hard high key broken into squares across the wall, clipping her shoulder and leaving her eyes in soft shade. Dust hangs in the window beam so the light reads as a solid shaft, the blown squares halate and bleed into the wall, grain blooms thick in the black of the stairs, and fine base scratches drift down the frame. Focus holds her face and the bag's handle while the flights above and below fall away into grain. Silver grey, dull olive, black. Tense, ordinary, interrupted.