THE IMPRESSIONS OF THE PHOTOGRAPHS by THE WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHER
Impressions. This is what the wedding photographer works for all day as soon as he arrives at the first place agreed with the bride and groom for their wedding day. Impression, to print, carries with it what it is: a copy in another dimension of what was.
I remember when I started photographing and needing to go to laboratories to have photographs made on paper, the kind that, at the time, I had made on slide or negative. In the slang, they were called prints. How many prints do you need? Do you want them printed on glossy or matt paper? What size do you want your prints? Well, this print looks fantastic…
That’s what a photograph actually is. Maybe we don’t have that impression, the other one, the feeling, when we see them nowadays on the screens of computers, tablets, or mobile phones. Those, in fact, do not appear in print.
They are in limbo, in a kind of ether. We can see them but we can’t touch them, feel the texture of the paper, smell the chemicals that allowed them to be, put them in an envelope to offer, probably cut them to fit the frame, or paste them in an album to take to the future that we want to belong to us. Printed photographs are impressions of the eyes, the nose, the fingers, the heart, and the soul.
With the photos that are an impression, we can know how long they have been there. In them too, he, that one who never stops passing, leaves impressions that give us signs of the time they have, just as we have it. That is why they are important. Nobody is so sad and desolate when they lose, for whatever reason, one of those prints, impressions, that we call photographs.
Even because, even today, when they are born in impressive quantities and live inside mobile phones and computers, only some of them will gain the noble status of print and, when they are lost, they generate a great sense of loss.
This is how, long before I was a wedding photographer, I came into contact with photographs. At that time they really had to be printed to have the status of photography. That’s why, despite putting them in this virtual limbo, I do everything so that my clients also take them as prints. I’m sure they last longer in the time, for which they were made since they were invented.
Well, it’s just the wedding photographer’s impression, so maybe it is….
