shashasha

Reiko Mogi’s “ The Riverbank Fish Market”: visual remains of a unique and vanished landmark

In October 2018, the Tsukiji Fish Market closed its doors forever, to be moved and reopened at a different location in Tokyo. Before the market was closed down, Japanese photographer Reiko Mori visited the market “without knowing anything about it”, and let her instincts and sensibilities guide her journey through the place as she captured whatever drew her interest in photographs. Her photobook “The Riverbank Fish Market”, then, is less a photographic record of a place doomed to disappear than a visual feast of sights and phenomena that have now disappeared. Her photographs treat the fish market almost as an ecological environment instead of a human-made reloading site, focusing on auction ceremonies, knives used to carve dead fish and the many handlers as much as light glistening in rain puddles or peculiar patterns of rust.
The book also includes an afterword by the author (in Japanese and English translation).