On Photography
By Robert de Gast, March 9, 2007

The Tuesday Market…on Wednesday!

The sign on the bus says Placita, (Little Plaza), or Tianguis, the Nahuatl word for “market.” But to foreigners living or visiting San Miguel it’s the Tuesday Market, a 12-acre congregation of stalls and stands on the outskirts of the city selling, well, stuff.

You need used bicycle parts? A T-shirt? How about some (probably) pirated CDs? Are you looking for a remote control for your TV? Some recycled designer clothes? Strawberries? Fresh fish? Patent medicines? It’s all here, every Tuesday, from early in the morning until late in the afternoon. It’s a wonderful place to take pictures, mostly close-ups, though, because the crowding and the crowds make showing it all in one photograph just not possible. But I always wondered what the market space looked like on some day when it was not occupied.

So here’s what it’s like on Wednesday: There’s nothing there on Wednesday, except a few grackles, three empty shrines, two of them dedicated to, what else, the Virgen de Guadalupe…. and 43,877 bottle caps embedded in the soil that the cleaning crew was unable to remove.

And there won’t be anything there until the next Tuesday when once again the astonishing bustle and hustle of mercantile Mexico will do its damndest to sell you whatever you think you need.

What does all this have to do with photography? Well, I vividly remember a photo-essay on baseball by the famed French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson that Life Magazine published in the late 1950s. It was on the Milwaukee Braves baseball team that was participating in the World Series. Amazingly, HCB never showed any pictures of the actual games. He showed the interests and enthusiasm of the fans at the periphery of the game, all the things going on in the stands and the locker room, all the telling details surrounding the games. It was a revelation to me: You didn’t need to show the thing itself to inform or entertain. Often the really interesting photographic material remains at the edge of the event: The spectators at the parade are often more interesting than the parade participants. The action behind the front is sometimes more revealing than the fighting at the front. You don’t have to go to interesting places to make interesting pictures. The actress Diane Keaton published a fascinating photographic book called Reservations which featured empty hotel lobbies around the country.

Sometimes all we want to do is explore the unusual, the mundane, or the unpopular. And sometimes that’s a way of getting a whole new perspective on the world around us.

 Making photographs of a deserted Tuesday Market on a Wednesday morning can feel like a sneaky experience. The great American photographer Diane Arbus once said: “Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies.”

Robert de Gast is the author, most recently, of Behind the Doors of San Miguel. He lectures and offers short photography tutorials. He can be reached at 152-7396 or via email at robertdegast@hotmail.com.