DO YOU NOW PERCEIVE? by WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHER
Some time ago a friend asked me why I loved photographing weddings so much, apart from the need to make a living of course. For the answer, I thought of everything that prompts me to pick up my cameras and lenses and find what they’re in weddings to give me so much commitment and, I admit, quite a bit of joy. I answered, everything. It was summed up in one word that did not leave him satisfied with the answer. But, come on, you go as a wedding photographer…to weddings. What is it about weddings that makes it so interesting to take photographs?
As I’m not much given to complex explanations and was looking to see if everything would leave him satisfied, which it didn’t. He tells me again. A wedding is a wedding, you say that you spend the whole day photographing non-stop and that you still leave many photographs that you didn’t get to see, others that you didn’t get in time to catch and, still, those that are always challenging you and running away because they always happen when you are paying attention to others.
Yeah, it seems like only wedding photographers get it and notice it. I think even those at the wedding or rather those who are at the wedding because a wedding is not a thing, an idea, or a space. A wedding is about the people who are there. They are the bride and groom, they are their relatives, they are the guests, they are the priests and the official state officiants, they are the ones who arranged the tables and decorated them with flowers, they are the ones who are going to entertain all those people with music and other things, they are the ones who transformed two people beforehand so that they can go into that ceremony entering as bride and groom and leaving as husband and wife, they are the lights that illuminate what the wedding photographer needs to shoot, they are the plants and trees in the gardens where they serve as frames in the portraits he will make, the flowers that are everywhere, etc, etc, etc.
Now, my dear man, think. Imagine yourself with two cameras in your hands, a bag full of lenses on your shoulder, in the middle of all those people doing what people do in a place like that, the wedding, and in the various places you pass through. You start to look with the eyes of a photographer, which is something you know what it is. You start to discover all those subjects, all those compositions that are made and unmade at an astonishing speed, all those faces that at times are moved and decorated with tears that insist on watching what is happening, at other times they laugh heartlessly because of the joy that the happiness of those who are there for that, to be happy, or even, at night, tired of so much food and dancing, they lean back in the right place for, imagine, a photograph that is being offered for the wedding photographer.
Don’t tell me you still don’t understand, now, why I love going back to weddings so much. He didn’t even answer me. He shrugged his shoulders, I say, with a twinge of envy.
