Monkey Shoulder at Next Door Records: a World Music Day shot in London

Next Door Records is a record shop in Shepherd’s Bush, London, turned into a listening bar for the day on 10 June 2025, for Monkey Shoulder’s World Music Day. Wood, record browsers, a shop window at the front, a red booth lamp at the back: nothing like a studio set.

The commission came from Ryan Goodman, Global Content Creator at the brand. I was on my own, as the photographer.

Shooting in London for a single day means deciding everything before you leave. The kit is whatever you carry, and a light left behind in France cannot be fetched once the doors open. So the recce happens remotely, from photographs of the room, and the shot list is written on the way to the airport.

Three hours in the empty venue while the bar was built, two and a half hours of closed event, two and a half hours open to the public. The empty hours produce no crowd pictures, and yet they decide the rest: where a glass goes, which row of bottles still reads in the background.

I work in natural light and with flash, which keeps one visual language across the day while the room changes temperature.

Five images were selected by the brand, then finished with its logo. They follow the order of the day.

Standing at three quarters so the row of bottles stayed readable without flattening the gesture. The thread of amber falling into the jigger is the only perfectly sharp point in the frame.

The glass and the bottle set on the wood of the record browser, sleeves kept in frame, barely out of focus. An isolated glass on a neutral background would have been cleaner, and would have said nothing about the room.

In front of the amplifiers, in the pale green of the back room that a booth lamp turns red. The guests were not models: I waited for the laugh rather than the pose.

Same wall, same distance, different attitude. He looks off to the side, which keeps the gesture in the register of a late afternoon. Flash from the left, slightly high.

At hand height, during the open event. Thirty centimetres from the lens, so the room collapses into patches of colour behind the two glasses.

A wide, fully retouched selection was delivered six days after the shoot, on 16 June 2025, with several frames in two grades. Five visuals were selected and published on the brand’s social channels; it came back in October for further images from the day.

The rest of the drinks and spirits work is gathered in the gallery, and St-Germain at Galeries Lafayette tells the same craft on an out-of-home format.