On 9 July 2016, residents lined up in Caracas under a new government system for providing basic food at low cost. Reuters’ photograph record identifies the date, city, photographer and purpose of the line. It does not establish the programme’s formal name, quantities distributed, queue length, waiting time or the exact products available, so those details cannot be inferred. What the image directly preserves is a change in access: inexpensive staples were not simply selected from ordinary retail shelves but obtained through a newly organised government channel and its sequence. A system intended to control price also reorganised the act of receiving food, making residents visible as ordered users of that channel.