Eastern Market

Author's Comments

The brick building itself is not the photograph, though it is handsome enough in the right light. What I come for is what happens against it. On Saturday mornings the market walls become a backdrop for everything else - the produce tables in their first hour of setup, the flower buckets, the vendors leaning into conversation, the long rectangle of light that slides down Seventh Street around eight in the morning and turns the red brick almost orange. That is the window. Before the crowds arrive and the light is still low enough to rake across the facade, the relationship between the building and the life in front of it is at its clearest. I tend to work the edges rather than the center aisle. The exterior arches, the painted signage that has been touched up so many times it has become its own kind of patina, the way a vendor's hands look when they are arranging peaches in the first good light of the day. Eastern Market is not a single composition. It is a hundred small ones, and the building is the frame that holds them together. Come in late spring or early fall when the doors are open and the air moves through. Come early enough that you can still hear individual voices.

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