The market before the light

Psar Thmei — the Central Market — is a yellow art-deco dome in the middle of Phnom Penh, and it does not care that you have brought a camera.

The first thing you notice at five in the morning is not the smell or the noise. It is that everybody already knows exactly what they are doing. There is no wandering. Produce arrives, gets sorted, gets priced, gets sold, and moves on, and none of it waits for you to find a good angle.

The second thing is the light — or the lack of it. Under the dome you get a few bare bulbs, some phone torchlight, and whatever comes in from the outer stalls. It is genuinely difficult to expose. I shot most of that morning at f/1.8 and 1/60th and still lost a third of the frames.

The third thing is the rain on the roof. When the wet season starts for the day, it starts all at once, and the whole market goes up about ten decibels. Conversation turns into shouting. Nobody stops working. It is the most memorable sound of that month.

The photograph of the woman sorting turmeric is the one I keep coming back to. She never once looked up. I asked, in Khmer that is not good enough to be proud of, whether it was alright, and she said something I am fairly sure meant do what you like, I am busy.

That is the honest deal with photographing people at work: you are not the main event, and the picture is better for it.