I Don't Really Do Weddings

On saying no, saying Aye, and ending up in Italy.

I've been saying I don't really do weddings since around 2012. Meanwhile, I've shot about thirty of them. Perhaps I should explain.

When I started doing photography in a more visible way, wedding enquiries arrived almost immediately and I kept turning them down. It seemed terrifying - too much pressure, too many expectations, too high-stakes to get it wrong. A portrait session can be rescheduled. A wedding happens once.

Then came a few I simply couldn't say no to. My old boss from The Print Box, where I'd spent years as a graphic designer before going out on my own. A musician I'd worked with who wanted someone she trusted rather than someone who did weddings. I reluctantly said yes to both and found, somewhat to my surprise, that I actually enjoyed it. I approached it the way I approach everything else - instinctively, docu-style, with as little interference as possible. Nobody peeking from behind a tree trunk.

That last line became a shorthand of sorts I've used ever since whenever a wedding enquiry comes in. If you want carefully posed groups, bridesmaids arranged in a chevron, the bride and groom staged against a golden hour sky - there are excellent photographers who do that brilliantly, but I'm not one of them (and anyway, good luck with trying to set up a golden sunset shot in Scotland). If you want someone to follow the day as it actually unfolds and find the moments worth keeping - that's a different conversation.

I have a theory about this. I think the images we return to, the ones that actually lodge in memory, are almost never the staged ones. When you think of your wedding day years later, your mind won't go straight to the group shot outside the church. It'll go to a brief moment - your best friend laughing at something you said, a knowing look exchanged across the room, a quiet second between the bigger ones. The photographs that capture those moments tend to be the ones taken when nobody knew they were being photographed.

The people who've chosen me for their weddings have mostly come through the same routes as everything else I do - friends of musicians I work with, artists, people in marketing and communications who've seen the work in another context and trusted it to translate. I've never advertised wedding photography. I've never put it front and centre on the website. The work finds its way to the right people somehow.

In creative industries, you become what you're seen to do. Make-up artists, hair stylists, photographers - once you're known for weddings, wedding work is what finds you. I was approached years ago by a Scottish venue to become their go-to wedding photographer. It was a significant amount of money but I turned it down. It just didn't feel like the right direction for the practice I was trying to build, and I don't regret it.

The people who approach me to photograph their wedding tend to understand intuitively what they're getting - which is not, among other things, 600 images. In my view, nobody needs 600 images from their wedding - unless you're Taylor Swift, perhaps (Madison Square Garden is a big venue…). Part of what I'm being paid for is the edit: carefully selecting the images that tell the story of the day rather than handing over every frame taken and leaving the couple to figure it out themselves. I'd rather deliver 150 images that mean something than 600 that overwhelm.

This May I photographed a wedding in the Tuscan countryside. The couple are friends - he's Italian, she's American, both based in Glasgow. We were at a party last year and the subject of weddings came up, as it often does when people find out what I do for a living. I said, as I usually do, that I didn't really do weddings - but if they were ever getting married in Italy (my favourite place in the whole world) they should count me in. We laughed. A few months later I got a text: remember when you said you'd shoot our wedding if we were getting married in Italy? There aren't many better things to point a camera at than your friends at their happiest, Italy or not, so of course it was a resounding aye from me.

It was, now that I think of it, my fourth wedding in Italy. I've also shot one in Santorini and was meant to do one in Washington DC but there were some visa issues that couldn’t be resolved in time (no, I don’t have a criminal record, I’m just from Eastern Europe).

As you can see then, I don't really do weddings. Except when I do - when it feels right, when the people are right, when the circumstances are right.

So if you're getting married, especially in Italy, hit me up. I don't really do weddings but I can be persuaded.