El Rastro

15 Minute Write

El Ratro the famous street market in the barrio de Embajadores, was the focal point of his fascination with the Madrileños and Madrileñas. The characters brought to life the intensity of their shopping needs, whether digging through ‘vintage’ clothes, imported wares, jewelry, cooling fans, or his favourite: secondhand books. They would start in an ordered manner in careful rows but within an hour they would be in disarray like the piles of used jeans and football shirts on the clothes stands.

He was in Madrid for the summer - a sabbatical from work, the rainy British summer and his approaching middle age. At first, he had felt lonely and melancholic, but as time unfolded and his rituals and routines formed, he became more content - almost happy. He started to become on nodding terms with the staff and locals in his favourite bars, restaurants and writing spots.  Later, as his Spanish improved, he could converse in snippets and this made him feel more and more adjusted and settled. The weather and the friendliness of this capital city, plumb in the centre of its country, suited him perfectly.

El Rastro was a Sunday and Bank holiday ritual. With his notebook and camera he would trawl the market down and up the hill to find interest and, it turned out, inspiration. He started to make small booklets with the photographs he took and wrote short pieces of text to accompany those people he photographed explaining why he had taken their portrait, what it was about them in particular that had attracted them to him.

Whilst he found his other writing hard going and lacking in direction, this work proved to be easy, enjoyable and prolific - whereas before he struggled to write a couple of pages a day he was finding himself writing twenty to thirty of these profiles in the same time frame. 

As these gathered in his room he struck on the idea of placing them in the book stalls he so loved - buried for others to find - perhaps one of the people he had written about might pick up a copy or recognise someone in it - he became obsessed with capturing the moment someone ‘discovered’ his work - would they love it, would they toss it aside, would they want to buy it, and how much would the stall owner charge them? Even though he felt massively protective towards these booklets, which he poured his heart and soul into, he found the need to feed this inner urge to let them go - to pass them on to someone else - to have them judged. Perhaps those who bought them would be kindred spirits?

As much as he hated the idea of putting any form of personal details in books, he could not stand the idea that someone might want to know more and not be able to. So he placed an Instagram handle in them and made the account  private so he could vet the contacts. When this afforded him a connection with a beautiful local girl he felt his misgivings to be utterly misplaced. Of course, the real story here isn’t of love but of the connection who would become his sworn enemy, the one who he had gregariously scythed down with his witty and erudite observations that could not be left un-reproached, only this time in actions rather than words.

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El Rastro, Madrid. August 2024 Nikon d750