Wait, I’m not ready for my close-up!
Being a wedding guest these days involves more photos than the red carpet at the Oscars, says author Wendy Holden
The rise of the spaceinvading wedding photographer, according to Wendy Holden
He was there, I could sense it. I felt hunted, persecuted. Any minute now he would shoot me. I did my best to ignore him; I knew he liked his victims to act spontaneously, as if unaware that he was near. Someone made a joke and I smiled, sealing my fate. Something flashed in my face. Something clicked and whirred. He had got me – again!
Welcome to the world of contemporary wedding photography. A world where nothing, from the buckles on the bride’s shoes to the stubble on the groom’s chin, is safe from the all-recording eye of the ‘lifestyle’ lens. Certainly not the guests. From the moment you arrive at the church to the moment you stagger out of the party (and most especially then), Big Brother, plus camera, will be watching you.
At a recent wedding in the Cotswolds, everything and everyone was shot endlessly by a bearded hipster with a digital Nikon. He would swoop in without warning to get a close-up of laughing teeth, or Granny quizzically examining an artisanal chocolate.
The resulting album, uploaded to the internet, was a festival of the fashionably informal. There were black and white shots of bridesmaids in bathrobes and psychedelically bright portraits of ushers clowning around outside the church. There were misty close-ups of ‘Just Married’ on the VW camper van and zoomed-in Union Jack cushions in the bunting-draped gastropub. It looked pretty, but what did it mean?
For decades, from the turn of the century to when I got married in the 1990s, wedding photography stuck to the same routine. A local snapper with a tripod commandeered everyone after the ceremony, shoutily lined them up outside the church or register office and shot a series of time-honoured groups. Bride alone, bride and groom together, groom with best man, bride and groom with his relatives, bride and groom with her relatives. Then gone, finished, over. Everyone could relax.
These days, no one can relax. In the age of smartphones, Facebook and the internet, no wedding-day image must be left uncaptured. Nothing is out of bounds, from the groom in the loo to the bride in her underwear (known in the trade as a ‘dressing shot’). And all those images will be Instagram-perfect, candid but flattering, spontaneous but glossy. Modern wedding photography has become the crossroads where festival-meets-fashion-shoot-meets-wedding.
This is really great for the happy couple, with their whitened teeth, salon-fresh hair, perfect outfits and months of sartorial preparation. They’re more than ready to star in their own perfect marriage movie. But what about us guests? We don’t want to be immortalised while creased from a long journey, flushed from a gin and tonic, with edamame bean in our teeth. We’re here to catch up with old friends, to drink and dance and celebrate. Later we might conga with a flower arrangement on our head. But wait, no. Not with that camera around.
Thus the lurking and ever-present lens, while it might take ‘natural’ pictures, actually removes some of the real spontaneity. In capturing the ‘unique’ details of the day, it makes every wedding look the same. The catalogue-shoot aesthetic, heads thrown back in laughter and swirls on the tops of cupcakes, lends a commercial air. Style, not substance, is what seems to count.
At home is a picture of my parents’ wedding, taken outside a cricket club in Yorkshire in 1962. My mother looks wary in a white satin dress, my father skinny and young in his suit. My parents had no money, but the clothes, plain as they are, exude 1960s elegance and restraint. The stiff line-up makes the personalities shine through. Whether the hipster weddings manage this after 50 onlinealbum years remains to be seen.
‘Nothing is offlimits, not even the groom in the loo’
• Wendy’s latest novel, Honeymoon Suite (Headline Review, £8.99), is out now.