London-based documentary photographer Donna Cyril turns a visit to Mumbai’s oldest fish market into a study of livelihood, dignity and the quiet pride found in honest work.
The best documentary photography does not explain its subjects. It trusts them. More Than Fish, Donna Cyril’s series from the Sunday market at Sasoon Dock in Colaba, Mumbai, earns that trust consistently: the images are candid and close without being intrusive, observational without being detached. What holds them together is a genuine respect for the people being photographed, and that quality of attention is visible in the results.
Sasoon Dock is one of Mumbai’s oldest, dating to the British colonial era, and Cyril arrived expecting to photograph a fish market. What she found was something wider.
“I came to photograph a fish market,” she says, “but I left understanding that it was never just about fish. It was about people.”
Moving through the crowded lanes, she observed flower vendors, vegetable sellers, net menders and fishermen, each occupying a small corner of the dock’s economy and each bringing to it a quality of focus and care that became the project’s real subject.
The visual approach is rooted in natural light and intimate framing, qualities that allow the images to feel found rather than constructed. The portrait of a flower vendor holding marigold garlands is a good example of what the series does well: the man stands with quiet confidence, the colours are warm and true, and the image communicates pride without sentimentality. The net mender working in a modest wooden structure, light filtering through the doorway, achieves something more complex: a sense of craft and patience that extends beyond the task at hand into something closer to a meditation on sustained skill. These are the images where More Than Fish most fully delivers on its premise.
Where the project is still developing is in the editorial selection and sequencing, where a tighter edit might allow the strongest images to carry more weight. Cyril clearly has an eye for the decisive moment; the challenge, as the series grows, will be trusting that eye to make harder cuts. “Work does not need to be grand to be meaningful,” she says of her subjects. The same applies to the photographs themselves: the most powerful images in the series are often the quietest.
Donna Cyril is a fine art and street photographer based in London, documenting the rawness and honesty of everyday life since 2015.
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More Than Fish, 2024. Documentary photography. Sasoon Dock, Colaba, Mumbai.
