A Lively Market Scene in Palermo

A photorealistic candid street photograph shot from about two meters in front of a fish stall in the Ballarò market in Palermo, at chest height, close enough to be standing in the queue.
A fishmonger in his fifties is mid-abbanniata, the sung shouted sales cry of the Sicilian markets. His mouth is wide open in full voice, head tilted back, both arms flung out and up in an unmistakably theatrical pose, palms open, body turned outward toward the whole street rather than toward anyone in particular. He wears a rubber apron over a t-shirt with the sleeves pushed up, forearms wet to the elbow, a cloth towel through the apron strings. He is performing for everybody and therefore for nobody.
Directly in front of him, a woman in her sixties with a shopping bag over one arm is leaning over the ice and pointing down at a specific fish with one finger, her face set in the flat impatient concentration of someone who has been to this market four thousand times, knows exactly what she wants, and is not listening to a single word of the performance happening thirty centimeters above her head. Her mouth is slightly open, already halfway into her own sentence, cutting straight across his. Two completely separate shows running at the same second in the same square meter.
Between them, laid across the crushed ice at the front of the counter, a swordfish head with its long bill angled outward and its round dark eye looking STRAIGHT OUT OF THE FRAME at the viewer. It is the only thing in the picture facing the camera, and it makes the whole thing.
The counter is banked with crushed ice and wet steel trays holding the full Palermo catch: whole sardines packed in silver rows, red mullet, octopus with curled tentacles, a heap of glistening anchovies, prawns, a split tuna loin showing deep red flesh. Meltwater runs off the ice and drips from the counter edge. Lemon halves and a sprig of parsley are pushed in among the fish. Handwritten price cards stick up on wire prongs as ink-stroke shapes with nothing readable.
Above the stall a faded striped awning and a patchwork of tarpaulins and umbrellas stretch across the alley, letting the late morning sun through in scattered bright patches and leaving the rest in warm reflected shade. Behind the fishmonger, crates are stacked four high, a hose coils on the wet ground, a plastic tub of ice sits half melted. Further down the market aisle, blurred shoppers and other stalls compress into a dense soft mass of color and movement. A second vendor further back is also mid-shout, his mouth open too, unheard by anyone.
Shot at 35mm f/2.8, ISO 800, 1/500s on a mirrorless camera. The fishmonger, the woman, and the swordfish head are all sharp, the crates and the market aisle behind soften into warm busy blur. The fast shutter freezes his flung arms and the drip falling from the counter edge. The light is bright dappled daylight filtered through the awnings above, warm where it lands and warm again where it bounces off the ochre walls, with no cool tones anywhere except the ice itself. The palette runs silver and wet across the counter, deep red at the tuna, warm ochre and faded stripe overhead, and the fishmonger's dark apron as the anchoring mass.
The composition puts his open mouth at the upper-left third, the woman's pointing finger at the lower-right third, and the swordfish eye at dead center staring out. The eye finds the shouting man first, then the woman ignoring him, then the fish looking back at you, which is the moment the picture turns funny. The mood sits between Bruce Gilden's close-quarters market energy and Elliott Erwitt's timing: two people talking past each other at full volume while a dead swordfish supervises.