THEM, ANOTHER TIME by THE LISBON WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHER
Because gestures matter. Perhaps, one of the most powerful issues a wedding photographer encounters throughout the day is gestures. What they do and what they mean by what they do. Over time I have learned to be aware of them and have found ways to discover them amidst the clutter zones that often have a desire, for the sake of wedding photographs, to invade the spaces and people whose job it is to make a wedding.
They come in many shapes and sizes. Sometimes they are just looks. Looks of letting me see if everything is going well, looks of delight for the son or daughter on their wedding day, looks looking for something that is missing and so many others that it would be tedious to list them all.
Other times it is even hand gestures, which are the most active in these things that draw the wedding photographer’s attention. They fix things, fetch things, hold things, and squeeze things. That’s their practical side.
But where they manifest themselves in their essence is when they touch out of affection when they fix what is already fixed but they think that without their fix it’s still not right, when they squeeze other hands as if passing on energy or whispering a good wish without words when they make that tender caress that only makes those who feel it feel it.
They calm down when those moments approach that have the habit of making you cry of emotion or they clean in time that tear that stubbornly escaped from the watery eyes, to leave immaculate make-up that took so much work and time. As you can see, wedding photographs are full of them, the hands.
But the ones that the wedding photographer likes best because they are often the most subtle, are the tender ones. They don’t always deliver it, they stay there in the distance as if they have the gift of sending the energy of the heart when it beats stronger, out of emotion.
Other times they are subtle and if the wedding photographer is attentive, with his eyes that know how to see everything everywhere, here and there, in a wedding photograph, there is a tender touch on the arm, I’m here, don’t worry.
As a wedding is about family, I can’t forget the faces that, tenderly, touch each other between the granddaughter, or grandson, the grandmother, or grandmother, with shimmering eyes tempered with seawater, I know, I love you too, a lot. As we have seen, gestures are everywhere and come from all the dank sources of tenderness, and affection, and even, it was just to fix the crooked button, yeah.
Wedding photographs bring them all out. Not because it was necessary to bring them because whoever offered them and received them engraved them in the memory of their atoms and they stayed forever in the memory of the soul.
But as the wedding photographer was there, I couldn’t let them stay just there, because seeing them again, in the wedding photos, gives us the guarantee that it wasn’t a dream or fantasy, it was true.
