Fishy Tourists | Art and

Like most visitors to Valencia, I was drawn to the Mercado Central. The structure is an architectural magnet, nearly impossible to ignore — a cathedral of iron, glass, and tile designed by Francesc Guàrdia i Vial and Enric Catà, completed in 1928. It feels closer to a civic monument than to a place of daily transaction. Inside, the space opens up almost ceremonially under the great dome.

Growing up in Buenos Aires, I understood the logic of a market at the heart of a community. There it was, the Mercado de San Telmo, less than a block from my flat in one of the most picturesque districts of my hometown. In Valencia, the atmosphere is hauntingly familiar: the same acoustic bounce of voices, the same rhythmic pulse of commerce, the constant awakening of the senses through smell and color.

Joachim Beuckelaer

And then there are the offering tables — the long counters staged with precision. Fish laid out in careful succession. Shellfish presented as if each piece were part of a larger composition. At one stand, an octopus extends across the surface, its tentacles spread outward, almost theatrical in its presence. It does not sit quietly. It rules.

The oyster variety is striking. You see geography in the shells — the size and density of flesh from the Cantabrian coast or the French Atlantic. But what interested me more was not the biodiversity on display so much as the situation unfolding around it.

The vendors are exhausted. Their growing intolerance for the casual tourist — not there to take fish home but to take a photograph for Instagram — is visible and entirely understandable. The constant presence of onlookers standing at the front of the counters, phones raised, is not a minor detail. The camera places itself between vendor and customer. It interrupts the exchange. What should be a direct interaction — a question, a recommendation, a purchase — becomes obstructed. The regular customers, the neighbors, hesitate—the rhythm breaks. Vendor and client may even switch to Valencian dialect to quietly register their frustration at the invasion of iPhone-wielding spectators.

The market begins to function differently. It oscillates between use and representation. I found myself avoiding the viewfinder, taking almost no photographs. It did not feel right to turn the counter into an image while someone else was trying to buy dinner. And it became clear that the actual photograph was not the fish. The photograph became tourists photographing the fish.

It is difficult not to think of the Mona Lisa. What one sees today in the Louvre is not simply Leonardo's work but a crowd of people holding up screens. The act of capturing has replaced the act of looking. The same thing is happening here. The octopus and the oysters are seen first as pixels. The exchange continues, but it is no longer the main event.

Fish have not always occupied this position. There is, of course, a Christian layer. The fish appears early as a sign — simple, reduced, almost coded. It carries meaning but not weight. It is not there to be looked at as an object but to be recognized. A mark of belief more than a subject of observation.

At some point, that changes.

By the sixteenth century, in painters such as Pieter Aertsen and Joachim Beuckelaer, the fish move forward — literally. They occupy the foreground. They are no longer symbols; they are things. Heavy, wet, present. You see them cut, displayed, and handled. The religious scene, if it is still there, recedes into the background. The sacred does not disappear, but it loses its central position.

The market takes over.

This shift corresponds to a broader change in how reality is represented. The everyday — food, labor, commerce — enters the frame with new authority. Fish and fruit, once secondary, become central. Not because they are symbolic, but because they are real, and because they can be seen.

And yet, even in those paintings, there is a tension. The fish are objects, but they carry something with them. They are recently alive. They resist complete abstraction. They insist on their origin.

Standing in front of the counters in Valencia, watching the octopus and the oysters arranged for display, I had the sense of being somewhere along that same trajectory. The fish are no longer symbols, and they are no longer purely functional. They exist somewhere in between — objects of consumption, but also of attention. And now, increasingly, of representation.

If the market becomes a place of observation, where does one go to see the process itself?

My instinct is to move closer to the source — to the docks where the boats arrive. In Sorolla's panels at the Hispanic Society in New York, the market is not an interior space; it is where the fishing boats dock. There, the fish are not yet staged or arranged. They are still part of a sequence: caught, unloaded, distributed. There is an immediacy there that is difficult to find under a vaulted ceiling.

More recently, in a Chinese restaurant in New York, a waitress referred to the fish as alive — meaning not frozen. The word stayed with me. The idea that the fish remained alive when offered at the table suggested a closer presence, more direct, more tangible. It is comparable, in a way, to experiencing the ruins of Tenochtitlan or Egypt in person rather than seeing a representation. Something is lost in translation, even when the image is accurate.

I am looking forward to my return to Valencia in July — not as a visitor, but as someone who will live within walking distance of the Mercado Central. I hope to experience its rhythms across the seasons and the hours.

The variety alone is enough to sustain attention, but I am looking for something else. I hope that in time I will find the opportunity to portray the people beyond the display. Often, the fish are like trees that prevent us from seeing the forest. They stand between the lens and the school.

I will wait for the moment when the camera disappears — when the fish are no longer a photograph, and the people finally come into focus.