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← PARAM BAHIA

AUGUST 2026

La Tomatina.

Valencia, the last week of August. La Tomatina is the tomato fight held in Buñol, forty kilometres inland, on the last Wednesday of the month — in 2026 the 26th. I was in it up to my knees.

The first night took my phone, my wallet and my watch, and left me analog for the week: maps copied into a notebook, directions asked for, days with nobody to answer to. One of the better weeks of my year. The frames open in the pulp at Buñol, then run from the sea to the fight to the old town.

The frames are from the week.

Me and two friends sitting shirtless in the tomato pulp in a Buñol street, grinning and giving the camera hand signs, the crowd standing behind us
The three of us sat down in the middle of it and posed, which was the only sensible response.
Glass of orange juice and a jug on a red café table, a shuttered stamp-maker's shop across the street
Juice at a red table on the 24th, across the street from a rubber-stamp maker.
Me shoulder-deep in the sea in sunglasses, one hand on my head, under a clear evening sky
The evening before Buñol, shoulder-deep in the sea off Valencia.
Me from below in a powder-stained white shirt, blue tarps and a festival banner overhead
Buñol, before the trucks, with only powder paint on the shirt so far.
A crowd covered in tomato holding up the tipping bed of a truck as its load spills out
A truck tips its load into the street, and the crowd holds the tailgate with bare hands.
Me shirtless against a blue tarp, chest tattoo and beard spattered with tomato
Pinned against the tarps that sheet the house fronts, wearing most of a truckload.
Sat in the pulp mid-fight, the street still taking fire around me.
Me laughing in the foreground of a narrow street running red with tomato, the crowd walking out
The walk out, down a street gone red from wall to wall.
Me in a black shirt in a Valencia street, a large Tàpies exhibition banner on the building behind
Back in Valencia, a Tàpies banner over the street behind me.
Skylit gallery lined with gilded Gothic altarpieces, one visitor walking away
The Gothic rooms of the Museu de Belles Arts, gilded altarpieces along a skylit hall.
Roller shutters painted with rows of tiger heads on Carrer de la Puríssima
Carrer de la Puríssima, two shopfronts of roller shutters painted with tiger heads.
Me in a black shirt leaning on a roller shutter painted in leopard print, at night
Another painted shutter after dark, leopard print this time.