Two women sit making bundles of lavender in identical yellow cardigans. Porters pause by bags of onions. A customer clad in black and white for the opera inadvertently matches his Dalmatian. Men balance teetering piles of chrysanthemum boxes between them. A buyer peruses lettuces with thin-lipped concentration. Horse-and-carts rattle alongside trucks. A couple wander through in their silks and striped trousers. Traders stop for a well-earned drink.
Over the course of those six years Boursnell recorded the comings and goings of the market with fastidious devotion, documenting and building up relationships with the many people who worked in and around the market. It quickly became an all-consuming project.
Still, Boursnell’s portraits remain, encapsulating the old market in its many moods and moments. It’s this plurality that perhaps makes his work especially compelling. Here everything is caught in passing. A hand. A face. A shared joke. A lit window. A box of broad beans. A barrow being pulled across slushy streets. A silent space waiting for the day’s deliveries. “Each picture is like a tiny facet of a multifaceted diamond before it becomes a whole,” he says.