By Tienlon Ho
- You are supposed to wear white, or some variation of white, if you are a bride. If not, you are what’s called an “alternative bride” and led over to the ball gowns and bridesmaids section when shopping for dresses.
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- You must have a wedding coordinator (or at least a caterer)! If you don’t have either, you will scare the people renting out places to put on your big event. They will tell you many times how hard it will be to do your wedding instead of just showing you around.
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- Also, very important, you have to decide which friends and siblings you love the most and tell them they are in the wedding party. This means they will have to move chairs around before the ceremony and crawl around in search of hidden electrical outlets afterward. You will reward them with silk-screened tote bags, flasks with their initials on them, and homemade jam.
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- You must serve lots of booze! Based solely on the number of people who have told me this with a certain look in their eyes, weddings are mostly terrible, and even worse when sober.
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- Positively, absolutely, the most important thing you are supposed to do is find a good photographer. As one friend said ominously while gripping my arm, “If you don’t have a picture of it, it’s like it never happened.”
While my fiancé and I aren’t so sure about any of the above requirements, we recently decided that the last one might be a reasonable (and easy) thing to knock off the list. So in between debates over the guest list (still not finalized) and finding a venue (check!), we scoured blogs and collected recommendations before contacting a local couple who had shot lots of weddings in a clean, unsaturated style that we both liked.
We exchanged multiple emails, bonded over the ups and downs of the freelance life over a video chat, and settled on dates and fees. Things seemed good. I finally ticked “Find photog” off our spreadsheet and moved on to “Figure out food.”
That’s when Jon decided to follow up with two ideas for “weird and funny photos.” One would be a shot of guests looking lost in the woods, he explained. Another would be of him prostrate (read: dead-looking) in the middle of an otherwise lovely scene. (Full disclosure: even though I know you’re judging us right now, this is something he’s done in various places around the world since 1995. It’s practically a family tradition.) “I just thought they would get it,” he says now.
They didn’t. The next day, our photographers fired us.
“We think that we may have different visions regarding your celebration,” they wrote in a very short email. “We feel that we have a different take on documenting weddings.”
After we stopped laughing, we realized we were a little hurt. Here were some fellow creative-minded individuals telling us that our ideas were so weird that they wouldn’t take money to help us make them happen. We wanted photos of our special day, and the people in the business of capturing those moments seemed to be telling us that ours wouldn’t be worthy of their time. Their rejection stung.
Was what we wanted really so crazy?
Here’s the thing: we might not know what we wanted for the ceremony or even who would be there to see it, but we were certain we wanted pictures of whatever happened and whoever showed up. And we wanted those images to be ones we would actually look at again someday.
For starters, we did not want anyone to hold themselves in a position that they had never, and would never, be in again.
At the risk of calling out some well-intentioned couples (whose marriages have been completely unsullied by the embarrassing albums underneath their coffee tables, I should add), we did not want any of the following: Jon and me frozen in mid-dip (known in the industry as the “first dance” shot); Jon carrying me like a baby (the “threshold” shot); my dad holding my hand as I eased my ridiculous dress into a waiting ’50s convertible (the “father helping the bride into the car” shot), or me waving flowers at a pack of matrimony-starved ladies (the “bride throwing the bouquet” shot). These are not things that have ever remotely happened to any of us in real life, unless you count that time when a friend’s photographer told Jon to dip me on the dance floor.
We did not want portraits of footwear. Or jewelry. Or both.
We did not want to remember the time all the bridesmaids had their backs turned to the camera. We would rather remember faces streaked with mascara and flushed red from wine than, well, butts.
The same goes for pictures of people holding fans, flowers, wine glasses, rings, small children, streamers, candles, dogs, or sparklers in front of their out-of-focus faces. There’s nothing wrong with a straightforward grin – gaps, chips, hidden leftovers, and all.
That said, nothing makes for a worse picture than forcing someone to smile. We learned this a few years back when a photographer at a friend’s wedding told Jon, “Put your hand on her shoulder. Turn your head to the left. Rotate your torso!” before barking, “Why do you look so unnatural?” It made us all feel uncomfortable, and it showed in the stiff jaws and clenched teeth she captured for posterity. Honestly, if you don’t catch a guest smiling on an occasion so momentous as a wedding day, there’s nothing anyone can do. It’s best to move on.
No one needs to remember the chalkboard.
We did not want photos of our friends pretending to help us get dressed. The photographer at my sister’s wedding asked me to put my hands on her already perfectly coiffed hair. The best thing that that pantomiming did was conjure up sweet memories of my sister braiding my hair to look like Princess Leia’s in The Empire Strikes Back. I’m not saying a picture of my sister in her wedding dress, with her pinning my hair into loops, would have made a good wedding photo, but it would have been better than one of her grimacing as I yanked on her head.
A glowing sunset is a thing of beauty, as exhibited on the covers of grocery-aisle romance novels, church brochures, and soft-core porn titles everywhere. But besides being an overused conceit, silhouettes of people kissing, surrounded by a halo of light, look like they could be of just about any two people just about anywhere in this solar system. Anyway, if a wedding is all about symbolism, I’m sure I’m not the first to point out that dusk symbolizes the end of something, while a wedding is all about the beginning.
Okay, sure, our wedding will probably be a little different from what it is supposed to be. That’s who we are. But what we want out of our photos is no different from what everyone else wants: we just want reminders of what we were feeling on our wedding day.
Getting married is joy. It’s a celebration of what brought everyone together and anticipation for what’s to come. If we are lucky to get a few pictures of our dearest friends and family discovering each other, connecting, and exploding with laughter, we will have reminders that the people we love shared what we felt. Those are moments we will frame.
In the end we did find photographers – a great couple we met at our friends’ wedding – whom we wanted to hire in the first place anyway (they were just a tad more expensive). They take beautiful photos. They are people we could be friends with. And when Jon asked them if they’d be willing to take pictures of him lying on the ground in his suit looking dead, they said, “That sounds like a blast.”
Photos via Thinkstock