Why the Best Wedding Photography Doesn’t Start With Wedding Photography
What do parties in 1970s New York, a Chicago street photographer, and a century-old fairy hoax have in common? They are how I approach every wedding I shoot.
The copies of copies problem
There is a particular kind of wedding gallery that is everywhere right now. You have seen it. Beautiful, technically accomplished, carefully made. Some of the same props/shots/ direction given, and completely impossible to place. It could be anyone’s wedding. This is what happens when a genre references itself too closely. When you work from work that was already an interaction, already an approximation of someone else’s vision, already filtered through someone else’s aesthetic decisions on someone else’s day you are making copies of copies.
The image gets flatter with each generation. The warmth becomes generic warmth. The emotion becomes performed emotion. You end up with something that fills an Instagram grid beautifully and forgets who it was for.
I have been shooting weddings for ten years. The single most important decision I made was to stop looking at wedding photography for inspiration almost entirely.
Almost. I’ll come back to that.
Where I Actually Look
Pamela Hanson. Dan Winters. Richard Avedon, Film-grab.com (a database of film stills). My other references are Larry Fink shooting at parties in the Berkshires in the 1970s. The Mamiya, the way his off camera flash hits subjects mid-motion and makes everyone look electric and slightly exposed. Vivian Maier on a Chicago street, finding the geometry in a crowd of strangers. Alex Webb layering colour and shadow until a single frame contains three moments at once. Tina Barney’s cool, unsentimental eye on family. The love and the discomfort sitting in the same image without either being resolved. Larry Sultan photographing his own parents and making the ordinary domestic world feel like the most charged place on earth. When you start to feed from outside the genre, what you make changes
The Exception
I said almost.
There is one category of wedding photography I do look at, and it is not current. When Daisy and Jake described their wedding to me as rat pack, loose, glamorous, a little louche, I went and found photographs of Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe’s actual wedding. Not a mood board full of modern editorials doing a rat pack impression. The real thing. The way people stood, the way they looked at each other, the specific quality of mid-century flash photography. That is the reference. Go to the source, not to someone else’s interpretation of it.
Sometimes couples send me images from other weddings, current trends, things they have saved. That is a perfectly good place to start. What I am listening for is the feeling underneath. What keeps drawing you back to those images, not the images themselves.
That is a different thing entirely from scrolling wedding Instagram for inspiration.
One has an origin. The other is the copy of a copy.
The Conversation Before the Day
A few weeks before your wedding, we talk. Not about timelines or shot lists. About what you want to feel when you look at these photographs in twenty years.
About the one image you would be devastated not to have. About whether you want your gallery to feel like a hot afternoon or a cool evening, like stillness or like motion.
I ask you to bring references if you have them. A film you love. A painting. A photograph from someone whose work you admire, or even from a family photo album. Anything that points toward the feeling rather than the form.
This is not about making your wedding look like a film set. It is about understanding what you want to feel when you look at these photographs in twenty years. Documentary at heart, but with a point of view.
When C&Z were getting married at Matara, I pulled frames from Atonement, looked at Monet, and found myself going down a rabbit hole with the Cottingley Fairies (the 1917 photographs of two Yorkshire girls who claimed to have captured actual fairies on film and nearly got away with it for years.) Something about the venue, the light, the way I saw them as people, made me want to chase that quality: beautiful, slightly unreal, like a dream you can’t quite hold onto. That became the brief.
What You Actually Get
A gallery that doesn’t look like everyone elses.
Not interchangeable. Not placeless. Something that is recognisably yours, the light we talked about, the feeling you wanted, the moment you didn’t know to ask for but that I knew to find because we had already done the work together.
You don’t need to arrive with a brief. You just need to be open. Curious.You do not need a ten-point brief or a Wikipedia page on Vivian Maier. ( But if you turn up with one, that is welcome!) Mostly you just know what you respond to, even if you cannot always say why. And that is enough to start.
What that trust buys you is a wedding day without a list. No half-attention on managing the photographer, no low-level anxiety about whether the shot of gran happened. By the time we get to the day, you just get to be in it.
If that sounds like the kind of collaboration you want, let’s talk.
