THEM by THE WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHER IN LEIRIA
Some photos of the bride and groom arriving at Quinta da Ramila for the wedding party
The satisfaction of looking
During all the years that I have been a photographer, it never crossed my mind what I could find in a place where, also, I never thought of collecting photographs. However, one day, as I have already told you here, I saw myself in one of them and discovered that they were there in such quantity and beauty as the trees that I looked at in the field, the birds that I saw flying through the sky or the rivers that, beautiful, gave their waters to the sea.
I never took photos of any of them. For some reason I didn’t have the patience to wait, for others, I didn’t enjoy the way, or for all of them, I was just satisfied to enjoy looking at them. I only knew much later, when I was traveling along a road for one of those places, that it was by looking, and only looking, that the moon taught me the reason why I was so happy in the new place I had recently discovered. Until then photography was a profession, and from then on photography became a way of life.
The dreams we dream
There I found what drove my cameras, and especially the lenses that connect them to the world, as if a will of their own made them run after framings, crouch suddenly to the ideal point of view, looking shy they hid themselves peeking through gaps like children pretending to disappear behind vases of flowers because of the frames they knew how to make and all this seemed to belong to a world, one of those that once in a while pass through our imagination and are soon left aside, like the dreams we dream but are forgotten when we wake up.
The dream was alive and vivid, but I later discovered it was not. It was just like that. I was a kind of Alice in Wonderland, only with the difference that my rabbits and playing cards were grooms, brides, and guests. The fantasies were realities I could transform into something else to which we give an almost religious importance.
The wedding photographs
It was my first real contact with them, even after having them around for many years. Before they just were, now they were. Now I could chase them as if I had gone back to my childhood when I would chase butterflies through the spring flowers and enjoy watching them landing from flower to flower, of all sizes and shapes. But, unlike the butterflies, they didn’t all run away from me.
Some were kind enough to wait for me, others, amusing and more given to joking, pretended they were going away but I was learning to catch them before they disappeared into the invisible net of the universe. I also found some were in such a hurry to become others that they did not let me arrive in time and I could not give them the joy of staying.
They were the wedding photographs. They were there and, for the first time, I felt like a wedding photographer, the one I had never thought of becoming. Until today.
- In Quinta da Ramila near Fátima, Portugal
