DOCUMENTARY wedding photography WITH A TOUCH OF WES ANDERSON
My wedding photography visual style is very much observational, reportage and editorial, which stems from my MA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography. But I appreciate that doesn’t really tell you a lot - most London wedding photographers these days say they do documentary - or the de rigeur term these days - editorial wedding photography. So I wanted to say a little bit more about my particular visual style.
And it might sound pretentious, but I’m influenced far more by cinema than I am by other editorial wedding photographers (even though some of them are great photographers, and I really admire the work of quite a few of them!) So you might notice a bit of Wes Anderson-esque whimsy and humour in my work.
Cinema is by definition about visual storytelling. And the best cinema uses subtlety and nuance to convey character and narrative without having to rely on dialogue - what is known as ’show not tell'. Think about ’There Will Be Blood’ or ‘Wall-E’. Not a word is spoken in either film for the first 20 minutes or so. And yet we learn so much about the lead characters.
I apply the same principles to wedding photography. So l look for authentic moments that reveal warmth, intimacy and personality. This applies particularly to the ‘couple portrait’ session, where I aim to capture something of your relationship. Of course, I don’t know what your relationship is like (although I assume it must be pretty good) which is why I concentrate on putting you at ease and capturing your natural interactions, mixed in with some slightly more posed shots.
But that does not mean I put you in cringey poses that look like you’re in one of those grainy black and white aftershave ads. Those kind of images are the antithesis of cinematic storytelling. They’re all style without any substance. So I won’t make you do this:
That doesn’t mean I am against a bit of stylisation. As I said above, I do like Wes Anderson’s stylised production design in particular, and often find myself composing photographs that are influenced by his cinematography.
I also love the cinematography of Jane Campion’s films, like The Piano, Power of the Dog and Bright Star.
But none of this is to say that I am going to turn your wedding into a film shoot, or that I will try to contrive or construct images very consciously to imitate shots from favourite films! Instead, it’s just to say that cinematic storytelling does inspire my approach to wedding photography (sometimes deliberately, sometimes unconsciously, and sometimes I watch a movie and think that looks a bit like a photo I took last week, as was the case with the example below).
