INSIDE HISTORY, FOR STORIES by THE WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHER IN ÉVORA
Because of photographs of the bride preparing for her wedding, in the Convento do Espinheiro in Évora, between walls with history
The reunion
As a wedding photographer, I’ve been back to the Convento do Espinheiro in Évora a few times. Every time I go there I can’t help but feel the satisfaction of knowing that I’m back in my Alentejo, even though I’m not from Évora, that I’ll be under that thermometer heat with the line already long.
However, the coolness of the old monastery puts us at ease, the bride and groom, the guests, and the wedding photographer who, in all honesty, can’t help but feel a sense of satisfaction at being reunited with a sun that reminds him of when he was younger.
Old walls for new events
Being there, being able to walk from cloister to corridor, from room to room, from staircase to church with centuries of stories and history to tell, pushes me towards the need to bring the contemporaneity of an event in the form of photographs dressed in old walls with the wisdom of the centuries and of those who have spent their lives there.
I say old and not ancient. Old things, and people, have the patina of time, they tell stories, they teach, they tell us that after the old people they have left behind, new people have arrived to celebrate a wedding ceremony, and that they will also bring new people and that time will continue to give way for other old people to become and other new people to pass through. Ancient is something to hang on walls to decorate them or take up space on tables used in the passage of time, such as the celebration at a wedding party.
The pleasure of transforming for the wedding photographer
That’s why wedding photographers feel at home here. Not to be, but to use. To transform these old walls, these corridors, these staircases into paths of life that today are bursting with energy, emotion, and joy in real settings that he takes advantage of, sometimes transforms with the help of his lens and always makes it feel like people have been there who have built, cared for, prayed and pointed out ways for all of us to be there today.
In the certainty that it won’t be the last time, the wedding photographer with the photos he can take there also guarantees that one of the memories of this convent will be part of a collection that, who knows, one day will serve to complete the history of the place. Possibly….
- In Convento do Espinheiro in Évora.
