THE CONVERSATION by THE WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHER IN SINTRA
A wedding day, in addition to everything it contains, passes through it and what it symbolizes for what is to come is, in the view of the wedding photographer, constant communication. It is as if it were a play, a film long awaited for release, or even a gathering of friends to celebrate something good.
It has a kind of script like in films and also an unwritten text like in some plays. However, they seem more like projects of experimentalist film and stage directors who leave the actors total freedom to improvise and behave as if they were in life itself.
This is how I see a wedding day, and for me as a photographer fulfilling the task of recording it in photographs, it contains the two things that on the one hand make my life easier and on the other hand constantly challenge me by that improvisation and prevent it from being a routine and… boring thing.
Having a kind of half-established script tells me what I’m going to do, how I can approach it in its parts, and know what I should do, and where I should put myself in each of them.
Containing all the improvisation, because the actors, or characters, as you wish, are unpredictable in their gestures, in the dialogues, in the entrances and exits of the scene, it allows the wedding photographer a constant renewal of his points of view, of the way he elaborates the compositions and never gets bored with the behavior of the subjects, because, despite being subject to that script, they have, at the same time, the great quality of never repeating themselves.
This is something that any photographer, or documentarian, wishes the most because despite the analogy up there, in the text, a wedding is not about a film nor is the wedding photographer a director.
So let’s forget, perhaps out of fantasy, this analogy with the theatre and with cinema, and let’s focus on what interests the wedding photographer and the reason why he always wants to have a camera in hand. I’ll call it communication.
Not mine with my cameras and lenses, that also exists and you have no idea how much, but that of the wedding participants with each other. It is more decoy for the wedding photographer than a freshly plowed field for all the birds flying around in the new fallow field.
Those who listen, those who talk, those who wait to talk, those who react to what others talk about, and even those who are not interested in any conversation, because there are those too.
To all of them, the wedding photographer is attentive and loves them. They, the talkers and the ones who listen to them, and who are always changing places, are the juice that flows endlessly through his lens and, after a complex process inside the cameras, they end up being transformed into wedding photographs.
Just the way we like it.
