The Wedding Witness

We're not  wedding photographers. It's a specialization which, if you advertise it, implies that you know how to get all the traditional shots and poses (bride with groomsmen, groom with bridesmaids, newlyweds feeding each other wedding cake...) without derailing the flow of the occasion and/or pissing off everyone in the wedding party. It also implies that you want to shoot weddings. Preferably, lots of them. For money.

We couldn't stand the stress. Now, we're not weenies: we've hung out of airplanes and down wells, braved security guards from Paris to Prambanan, swum with sharks and shot shuttle launches. But back when we started making pictures, in the late great days of film, you couldn't count your bridesmaids until they came back from the lab in little yellow boxes or in hanging sleeves with their sprockets neatly aligned. The thought of that awful phone call-- "Hello, Kristin? Your wedding was really beautiful. Unforgettable, actually. Which is a good thing, because, um, the film got ruined in processing. Yes, all of it. I don't suppose you and Peter could, like, get your family back down here from  Anchorage and... no, I guess not" -- was enough to give us flop sweat. We salute all the hardy souls who regularly undertake to record one of the most emotionally fraught and un-reshootable days in their clients' lives.

That said, every once in a while we find ourselves shooting wedding pictures for a friend. Sometimes the friend just doesn't have money for a real wedding photographer, or just really wants our quirky take on the event. Sometimes we're just  guests at the wedding who happen to have brought a camera-- okay, a Canon 1Ds Mark III (capturing 21 MP) with a 70-200mm 2.8 lens and a warm-tone polarizer. My point is that the pressure is off, and we're free to witness the occasion our own way.

Weddings are all about witnessing, which technically means being able to give a firsthand account of an event or experience. Long before streaming video, Vera Wang, or professional florists, people left their smoky, flea-infested hovels to come together as witnesses to weddings, baptisms, executions, and burials. When everyone in the community had seen you marry Edwina, it was part of the communal memory: you couldn't deny it five years later because Edwina had gotten boils on her face and you wanted to marry Demelza.

Sometimes we witness moments that stick with us even though they're not what we crawled out of our hovels to see. Recently we were guests at the wedding of Natalie Coward, daughter of our friends Jay and Renée. Natalie and her fiancé, Marty, had hired a real wedding photographer, and he was busily covering all the expected bases. But as friends of the family, we were the ones who barged into the cabin where the bride was dressing, in order to rehearse a song with her father and the maid of honor. Actually, Will was rehearsing; but while he did that, I was watching Natalie, the bride. She was beautiful, and her gown was beautiful, and the light coming through the cabin window  was just enough for me to shoot her looking out at a cousin who had been her childhood playmate. 

It wasn't the official wedding photographer's fault that he didn't get this shot; there was no way he could have. And I hope he understands that I wasn't trying to show him up. I was just being a witness for the record--  the unofficial record of small, unplanned, yet beautiful moments in  life.