THE BOOKS BY THE WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHER
From portraits of the groom, moments before he left for the Church of Santo António in Reguengos de Monsaraz for his wedding ceremony.
Books and photographs
Portraiture has always fascinated me. I remember eagerly browsing through every magazine, newspaper, or book with pictures when I was a child. Of course, when it came to anything pictorial, my eyes had a greedy tendency to hover and appreciate. When I went to collect books from the Gulbenkian van, I always had a great appetite for those with engravings, photographs, and reproductions of paintings. Perhaps I was a budding wedding photographer by then.
When I first picked up a camera, it wasn’t the people who made me point the lens that came with it. It was everything and nothing concrete. It wasn’t until much later that I started focusing on faces and people sitting down. Perhaps because the ones that were moving, due to my lack of knowledge of how to use them, didn’t let the apprentice photographer go at the right time and always gave very bad results.
In the mountains
But I remember, especially when I was in an area with big mountains, being asked to photograph the mountain peaks as if they were figures worthy of being portrayed rather than the big valleys, allowing illusions of perspective to show how big everything was. Even a tree, a house on top of a hill on a steep alpine mountainside was more appealing to my eye than the magnificence of the whole as far as the eye could see.
Portraits of the parts
It’s not strange, then, that many years later as a wedding photographer, I’m still the parts of the whole in the various spaces where a wedding day metamorphoses, from the moment the bride and groom get all dolled up until the last act when the night is long. I always find, amid the hustle and bustle, the rushing from one place to another or the, sometimes magnificent, ceremonial temples, parts of them that enchant me more than the whole and make me think that this way I can better tell the story I’m there to tell.
The portrait of the groom ready to go to his chosen one and say, “Yes, I do,” at an altar in a little while is undoubtedly one of those parts that never ceases to dazzle me, just like those books in the days of the Gulbenkian van.
