A wedding is made up of countless moments. Some are the obvious ones we all expect; the couple walking down the aisle, the first kiss, confetti, speeches etc. You get the point, right. Some though are less obvious and can be easily overlooked.

Here’s an image which sums this up perfectly. OK, so there’s no happy couple smiling at you from the screen and if this photo wasn’t here, on a wedding photographers website, you wouldn’t necessarily know it was taken at a wedding reception, right? In fact, this has more in common with the various strands of street photography we’re used to seeing on instagram. However, it most certainly was taken at a wedding (Becky & Josh’s back in June ‘22), and for those who were there, its tells as much about the day as a portrait of the happy newlyweds. For this reason, it’s one of my favourite images from the last few years. It’s not ‘epic’, particularly clever or filled with visual semantics but instead is a properly spontaneous moment which goes towards telling the story of one couple’s wedding day.

Decisive Moments

So there’s this French photographer who, outside of photographic circles, you’ve probably never heard of. He’s called Henri Cartier-Bresson and is kind of a big deal in the history of photography. He’s the the supposed creator of the ‘decisive moment’.

Photography is not like painting. There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera - Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1957

I’m regularly reminded of his words. Intuition plays a massive part of a wedding photographers role, especially if you work in a reportage style, as I do. Most moments happen so fleetingly, we inevitably miss them. Every now and then though, everything aligns and the split second the shutter fires, you know you’ve captured a special moment.

There’s a growing trend at the moment for wedding photographers to describe themselves as ‘artists’. However, I don’t believe wedding photography shouldn’t be regarded as ‘art’ and photographers are not artists. At best, we have more in common with craftspeople or artisans. We are tasked with creating a curated visual record of a single day in two peoples lives. This isn’t an exercise in expression of artistic intent or an opportunity to explore deep, wide ranging social issues. Instead, with varying individual approaches, us wedding photographers compile sets of images which friend and fellow wedding photographer Guy Hearn recently summed up pretty well:

Wedding photography is a joke in the world of ‘proper’ photographers… I have come to realise that the ‘joke’ is actually the irony. Wedding photography is possibly one of the most testing photographic disciplines, (admittedly well behind war photography), but I don’t even think about the challenges anymore. They are just things to deal with, quickly and without fuss. Get good pictures. Eat some wine gums. Get home safe. That’s it. And a few weeks later…maybe get a lovely card through the post. That’ll do me. Guy Hearn, 2021

So there you have it. The real secret is to be open to your intuition, have a kind heart and spend a day ‘being in the moment’.

Thanks for looking at this Talking Pictures post - if you’ve enjoyed it, why not see others in the series which dig a little deeper into a single image and the thinking behind it.