By day the market sells produce and cheap electronics under corrugated roofing. By eleven at night, a different market opens on the same site — folding tables of secondhand clothing, food carts that only appear after dark, a small stage that hosts unadvertised sets from local bands most weekends.
This essay followed that second market across six visits over two months, tracking the same handful of vendors as they set up and broke down: a coffee cart run by two friends who split shifts around day jobs, a clothing table stocked entirely from thrift hauls, a food stall whose owner also plays bass in one of the bands that occasionally performs a few metres away.
“The market has two entirely different economies, and the second one only opens at eleven.”
What the photographs try to capture is the specific texture of a space built almost entirely by its own regulars, with no signage, minimal lighting beyond string lights and phone torches, and an audience that is functionally the same group of people running the stalls, taking turns on either side of the transaction.
None of the vendors interviewed expect the market to formalise, and most are actively against it — one pointed out that a permit process would require fixed hours, and the entire appeal of the space is that it starts whenever enough people show up and ends whenever they leave.
The full series, thirty-one frames, ran unedited in the order it was shot, on the theory that the market itself doesn't organise into a narrative and the photographs shouldn't pretend otherwise.
