After the catch: behind the scenes of bluefin tuna

Barcelona.

Night has already settled in for hours. We drive, and keep driving. Security checkpoints come one after another, and then, suddenly, I find myself in Mercabarna. A city within a city. Gas station, restaurants, bars, cafés, hotel... A parallel world unfolding before me on a scale far beyond anything I had imagined.

One of the many entrance of the fish market

Something else exceeds my expectations: the size of the fish I have come here to photograph.

I travelled from Paris to document the place where tuna weighing up to 250 kilograms are cut and processed. Genco Development commissioned me for this assignment because of my high-contrast visual style and photographic sensibility. The subject matter is dark, raw, sometimes violent, yet incredibly graphic.

The tail is one the first parts to be taken off

I find myself thinking of Marc Trivier's photographs of Belgian slaughterhouses, and I know there is a particular beauty to these workplaces that most people never get to see. So begins two nights of shooting at the heart of a meticulously choreographed industrial ballet.

In the end, I made several hundred images. Most of them cannot be shared for confidentiality reasons. But the photographs above offer a glimpse into the atmosphere of those nights spent at the heart of this fascinating world