There are a lot of pitfalls to shooting weddings. There’s the stuff that everyone knows about: the pressure to get the perfect shots, the equipment and know-how to deal with impossible lighting situations and antiquated venue restrictions, competition from the Uncle Bobs and Aunt Marthas in the crowd. But there’s a more intangible aspect. I often feel like every wedding I’ve attended in the past decade is something of a staged show, but for the kind of photographs I like to take, I try to turn the keenest eye I possess toward the stars of the show, and I wait with bated breath for those true moments that illuminate why we’re all there in the first place: our unending desire to love and be loved and to share who we are and who we want to be and everything that life can throw at us with someone else. And while there’s always that lens between you and these two people, by the end of the day, you feel like you’ve come to know them, in a way. You’ve seen the bride flit across the dressing room in nervous anxiety; you’ve tried to hide in the shadows as the groom silently questions whether he’s really prepared for everything that lays ahead. You, and possibly you alone, see the fear flickr across their faces as they say their vows, and because you consider yourself something of a student of the human condition, you see that the only real feeling as they cut the cake is relief that one of the longest days of their lives is about to be over. And in between all the cacophony and chaos are those moments when the crowds just melt away and the simplest of all emotions is shared between the two people you came to watch. And you try your best to capture it forever.
And then, it really is over. The wedding, the reception, the speeches and dances and garter-tosses. You pack up your gear and realize you’ve been standing on your feet without anything more than a five-minute break for ten hours straight. You go home and start culling through the thousand or fifteen hundred photos you might have taken, and you see the entire gamut of human emotion. You choose only the happiest ones, of course, for the album the wedding party will see later. And you smooth out wrinkles and clone out imperfections and add vignettes and push the exposure so that everything looks bright and happy and shining, and you only wish that the lives of these two people who you now feel you know in a way that no one else quite does would stay the way you’ve made it look on your computer screen.
And then it doesn’t. And 109 days later, the photos you took of this day for this couple you had never really met before that day might be the one thing that the bride in your photos, one of the co-stars of the show, turns to again and again as she tries to deal with the fact that her role has changed irrevocably; that she is now, in fact, a widow.
I am so, so sorry.
