In this story
The fish market opens at four in the morning, which means the people who work there have usually been awake since two or three. By the time most of the city is having breakfast, the best of the day's catch has already been sold, packed and sent on its way to restaurants, shops and other markets across the country.
For a winter, I spent one morning a week at the market, making portraits of the people who work there. This series is a collection of twenty-four of them, along with a few photographs of the place itself.
A portrait session in a fish market
Portrait photography usually involves control: a studio, a chosen background, light shaped exactly the way you want it. None of that was available here. The market hall is noisy, wet, crowded and lit by a mixture of overhead strip lights and grey winter daylight from high windows. Everyone is busy. Nobody has time to pose.
So I set up a simple, portable arrangement in a corner near the loading bays: a dark grey cloth backdrop clipped to two stands and a single soft light. When people had a spare minute — between auctions, during a tea break, while waiting for a lorry — they would step in front of it. Most portraits took less than two minutes. Some took thirty seconds.
The auctioneer
At the centre of the market is the auction, and at the centre of the auction is Malcolm, who has been calling prices for forty years. He speaks in a rapid, rhythmic chant that is almost unintelligible to outsiders and perfectly clear to the buyers who crowd around him. Crates of fish change hands in seconds.
When I asked to photograph him, he agreed on one condition: that I also photograph his hands. "That's where the money is," he said, holding up fingers stained with marker ink from decades of writing lot numbers. His portrait, and the photograph of his hands beside it, became the centrepiece of the series.
A portrait isn't a picture of a face. It's a picture of a moment someone decided to share.
Faces
What struck me most, across the whole winter, was the variety of people. Fishermen's sons and daughters who had grown up in the trade. A former accountant who changed careers at fifty because he wanted to work with his hands. A young chef from a city restaurant who came every week to choose fish personally. Two sisters who run a small processing business and finish each other's sentences.
Each portrait is accompanied in the exhibition by a single line, chosen by the sitter, about their work. Some are practical. Some are funny. One simply reads: "Cold hands, warm heart, early nights."
The place
Alongside the portraits, I made a small number of photographs of the market itself: crates stacked to the ceiling, ice glittering under the lights, the floor being hosed down at the end of the morning. These act as pauses in the sequence, reminding the viewer where the faces belong.
My favourite is the last one. By about nine, the market is empty. The floor is wet and shining, the crates are gone and the hall is silent except for the gulls outside. It looks like a completely different building. Tomorrow, at four, it will fill again.
Building trust
For the first three mornings, I didn't take a single portrait. I helped carry crates, drank a great deal of strong tea and answered the same question many times: "What's the camera for?" By the fourth week, people had stopped asking. By the sixth, a few had started bringing colleagues over to stand in front of the backdrop.
The market has a reputation for being closed to outsiders, and I understand why. It is a working place, with its own language, hierarchy and rhythm, and it doesn't need a photographer getting in the way. What opened it up, I think, was simply turning up every week, at four in the morning, whatever the weather. Showing up is most of documentary photography.
Editing the series
I photographed more than sixty people over the winter. The final edit of twenty-four was chosen partly for the strength of the portraits and partly to reflect the full range of people who work there — young and old, new to the trade and born into it, traders and porters, buyers and the woman who runs the tea stall.
Technical notes
- Camera: medium-format digital for portraits; 35mm digital for the market
- Lighting: a single large softbox, battery-powered
- Backdrop: hand-painted dark grey canvas
- Sessions: 14 mornings, December to March
With thanks
To everyone at the market who stepped in front of the backdrop, and especially to Malcolm, who made sure I was never in the way of a forklift. Every sitter received a print of their own portrait.
Prints
Eight portraits from this series are available in editions of 12, printed on matte archival paper. See Prints.