Pike Place Market

Author's Comments

The neon is the photograph everyone makes and the photograph I have made too. Pike Place at dusk in winter, when the wet pavement throws the red of the sign back up at you and the clock reads something close to five, is a real picture and I will not pretend otherwise. But the market I keep returning for happens earlier and lower. Six in the morning on a Tuesday in February. The fishmongers are setting up but not yet performing. The flower sellers are unwrapping buckets of tulips that came down from the Skagit Valley the day before. The light is gray and flat and entirely Pacific Northwest, and it does something to the produce stalls that the brighter hours cannot. Color reads differently against that softness. A pile of apples becomes a still life rather than a snapshot. Then I go down. The Down Under levels are where I have made my favorite frames here, and almost no one else is working them. The light comes through old windows at strange angles, the shops are cluttered in a way that rewards a close lens, and the whole place feels less like a tourist landmark and more like the working market it has been since 1907. Bring a fast prime. Forget the wide shot of the sign for an hour. The market has been photographed ten million times from the corner of Pike and First, and almost never from the stairwell two floors below it. Come back up for coffee when you are done. The crowds will have arrived by then and the day will belong to them.

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