I captured this wild red sea bream (madai) at the old fish market Tsukiji in Tokyo which I’ve visited a couple of times. It wasn’t pretty in any conventional sense. The market was huge, wet, noisy, chaotic and smelled exactly like you’d expect a place handling the ocean’s harvest to smell.

Nothing there was staged or polished. Everything was real.

Tuna the size of small motorcycles lay on the tables, being cut with a brute force precision that had nothing to do with show and everything to do with mastery.

As a photographer, it was almost unfair. Everywhere I turned there were layers – texture, motion, contrast. Steel against flesh. Ice, blood, tobacco, sweat. Fluorescent light bouncing off slippery wet concrete. I never had to look for compositions. They were everywhere.

What struck me most wasn’t the scale or the spectacle. It was the lack of performance. Tsukiji didn’t care if I was there. I was the outsider, briefly allowed to witness something that had been running long before I arrived and would continue long after my departure.

Like the old Fullton Fish Market in Manhattan that moved to the Bronx but kept its name, Tokyo’s wholesale fish market has also relocated and been renamed Toyosu.