Why I Photograph Weddings

Clonabreany House, Co. Meath

The short answer is that I really enjoy weddings. Not for the pomp or the fancy clothes but because i get to work with folks who are at their happiest but that’s not the real answer…

The longer answer is about access. Weddings are one of the very few occasions in adult life where people stop performing. Where a man cries at a speech and doesn't apologise for it. Where the usually composed, usually private people in your family just let go completely for a few hours. A grandmother gets pulled onto the dance floor and goes for it. A brother gives a speech and says things he would never say at a dinner table.

You don't get that access anywhere else. Not as a stranger with a camera.

There is something the photographer John Dolan wrote once that I keep coming back to: “beneath the theatre of a wedding is the true perfection, the linking of two lives.”. The venue, the flowers, the seating chart, the order of the day, all of it is theatre. My job is to see what's underneath it.

I got married myself. At Brooklodge in Wicklow, which also happens to be one of the first venues I recommend whenever someone asks me about Wicklow. Annie and I were married there, which means I spent that day entirely on the other side of this and without a camera, without a job to do, completely exposed to being photographed by someone else.

It was a useful reminder of what it actually feels like to be the subject. There is a real vulnerability to it that I think you can forget about when you spend years behind the lens. Couples are trusting you with something unrepeatable. One day of their life, and you are the only independent record of it that will ever exist.

I carry that with me.

People use the word documentary the way they use words like artisan — loosely, and sometimes without meaning much. What it means to me in practice is staying present. Resisting the urge to arrange people into something prettier than it actually was. Choosing patience over control.

The best photographs from any wedding day are nearly always the ones nobody posed for. The ceremony moment nobody turned and signalled me to catch. The look between two people who thought the room wasn't watching. Those photographs take more discipline to make, not less because the temptation, especially when the light is good and the scene is beautiful, is to stop things and direct.

I almost never do.

If there is one thing I find at every wedding, regardless of venue or season or how the day is running, it is the five minutes a couple gets alone immediately after the ceremony ends. Before the room floods in, before the congratulations start, before everyone wants their photograph with them. Just those few minutes where the two of them are standing together in this new thing they've just done, before the world catches up.

I try never to miss that window. It moves fast and it doesn't come back. But it is almost always where one of the most honest photographs of the day lives.

Brooklodge, Co. Wicklow

In thirty or forty years, those photographs are going to be the clearest evidence a person has of who they were on that day. How they looked. How the people they loved looked. What the light was doing. The photographs outlast everything else, the flowers, the food, the dress. They become the primary record.

That weight is present at every wedding I photograph. Not as pressure, exactly. More as a reason to pay attention.

I have photographed well over 350 weddings at this point. The thing that still makes me arrive early, still makes me walk the venue before the morning starts, is the same thing it was at the beginning.

The day is unrepeatable. Something is going to happen today that has never happened before and never will again, and I am one of the only people in the room whose job is to see it.

I am not going to miss it.