Fish Market, 2

This fellow's job is to clean the fish once you have chosen and paid for it at the main counter. We bought a kilo of cuttlefish for €7. Note how clean the water in his bowl is as he starts to work.

Basically, his technique is to pull open the top half of the cuttlefish and rip out its guts.

Then, splash, into the bowl of water to be rinsed off. The water has turned black because cuttlefish have a sack full of black ink that they use for defense like squid and octopuses. This ink is called "sepia" (the Italian word for cuttlefish is "seppia") and used to be an important natural dye used for writing, and as an additive in watercolours and oil paints.

Beginning in the 1880s, sepia tone was produced by adding a pigment to the positive print of a photograph. The pigment was made from the Sepia officinalis cuttlefish, found in the English channel. The chemical process converts any remaining metallic silver to a sulphide, which is much more resistant to breakdown over time. This is why many old photographs are sepia toned—these are the ones that have survived until today. Although sepia toning began as a printing method, today it is seen as a genre, much like black and white photography.