Fish Photographs, Black Scabbard Fish Portugal, 1996

A series of photographs made in an indoor market whilst on a family holiday in Portugal. Taken with an old Mamiya medium format camera, a camera held at waist level, enabling me to take photographs looking down through the viewfinder avoiding eye contact with the local shoppers in this busy space, although, I was certainly watched with interest. I exposed just one film, slowly working my way around the space, there were 11 images on the film, all were used in this series. The aesthetics of these close up photographs with a shallow depth of field is very typical of the cameras’ facility to capture the qualities of these sliver ribbon fish. Moving around the space I felt part of and apart from the space, drawn closely to what I’m looking at, it was an intense experience. Later and rather shockingly, the same aesthetics can be seen in the photographs of Willy. Red star, Gaultier suit, Crocodile shoes.

These were not fish I recognised, you certainly wouldn’t catch these in the cold Irish Sea. To me, they were extraordinary, laid out on marble slabs. Black scabbards are found off the coast of North East Spain and Portugal, in the Atlantic Trough.