A WEDDING CEREMONY, CHAPTER 5, by THE LISBON WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHER

Here they are waiting, also the wedding photographer, the ones who diligently transformed a corner between the battlements of a castle in Lisbon, where before kings, princes, and princesses, some enchanted moors as told in the chronicles and tales, and also, knights have defended defenseless ladies, as there were many in the old days, again according to such chronicles and tales, in a beautiful place for a groom and a bride to get married. Those who arrive also join the groom in waiting for the princess of the day in a wedding ceremony, witnessed by the wedding photographer and by all the tourists from all over the world, completing a circle that began, perhaps, with ideas born in this castle, S. Jorge, when Portugal reached the whole world and, now, it is the whole world that reaches Portugal.

That’s what interests me. When I’m a wedding photographer, although I’m prepared for it, I like things to happen in an unhurried way. I like that “it’s done by doing”, a prolonged gerund to give me time to write everything down in photographs, not letting anything slip away, even those gestures that may seem secondary and, in the end, be great photographs, or, something I really like, using some of them to be frames for the photos of others, out of the corner of my eye seeing someone who arrives and turns all eyes immediately afterward, hello, are you already here? look, I brought these flowers to decorate the wedding ceremony table, a little boy who, shyly, snuggles in his mother’s lap or the last minute hug just because he feels like it.

I like the fact that the only person who can be seen there without time is the wedding photographer, such are the motives, subjects as they, the photos, call it while the others linger in these affections and conversations waiting for the bride still in her final preparations, in a hotel room near where, in a little while, she will metamorphose from bride to wife, as a lady from the civil registry, later on, will call her. But first, the wedding photographer still needs to photograph her at the moment when, shy but triumphant, with her father, she will enter the battlements of the castle, just like those princesses have done for centuries, some of them enchanted, and instead of standing between rows of knights she will walk among those tourists who come from all over the world and who, I swear, also make way for her, the princess bride of today. I swear, it was not fantasy, you will see it in the next chapter.