Memories of a wedding.
I’m not a wedding photographer. I wouldn’t know what to capture, how to frame the important things and what to exclude. When I was invited to bring my camera along to Kate and Dipo’s wedding day, I had already decided beforehand, that I was going to shoot this as I would do when I came across decisively special moments on the streets. The camera is an extension of my eye, recording the memories which I chose to keep and for me, the world is life, and always in motion. Photographing a wedding was to capture life playing out in motion.
I am not a wedding photographer, for I only know how to put together photographs to tell a story. For me, a beautiful photograph wasn’t about delivering the slickest portraits with the a touch of the speedlite; instead the beauty of photographing life, was to capture the essential speed and movement of life itself and especially the people who had come together to make it happen. I wanted documents which when pieced together and viewed as a sequence, told the story of Kate and Dipo, like a paper movie, even if I was aspiring to be only an ounce as good as Robert Frank’s eye for making a paper movie.
I could never be a wedding photographer because I was constantly witnessing, constantly waiting for the truth to unveil itself in front of my camera, for the real emotions to spill out from the most momentous of occasions, for the love to manifest itself, and I didn’t know how one could freeze that with poses, because love – at least for me – is something that is patiently serendipitous. So I was patient, I waited for the smiles, for the hugs, for the laughs, for the tears, for the love to show itself in front of my lens if only for a split second, so I can steal the moment.
I am not a wedding photographer because my photographer’s eye only seeks the modest in the carnival. It is always the hunger for the truth and the reality which guides my frame of what I choose to exclude and what I choose to include. Something pure, something impassioned, something real, something born of patience and something that’s abit of an act of love.
Here are my first photographs of a wedding : Kate & Dipo.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 29th, 2009 at 11:23 pm and is filed under Blog, daily rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
