Fashion Wedding Photography

Fashion photography is a much maligned mode within photography for reasons that I’ve never really quite understood.  The history of photography is peppered with unhappy photographers that have taken this kind of work under duress to pay the bills, or, in the case of celebrated portrait photographer George Piatt Lynes, actually destroying most of his fashion work before his death in 1955.  And perhaps there has been a sense that their art was compromised — maybe if you take the view of the (massively overrated) bombast of Bill Hicks, for example, with his, “Here’s the deal, folks: You do a commercial, you’re off the artistic roll call, forever. End of story. Okay? You’re a corporate fucking shill.” line.  Yeah, okay, Bill.  Great firebrand stuff if you like sledgehammers and huge egos.  But life is too nuanced for that.  Equally there’s a lot of fire in the wedding industry from diehard documentary wedding photographers who cling dogmatically to one way of seeing the day, spots, tired eyes and all.  But for me, the bottom line is photography is about image making — if it resonates it resonates — and there have been so many great images created by photographers working in fashion that this anti-stance just seems a little too precious to me.  So today’s image is a little bit of both.  It’s a wedding image shot with a fashion sensibility.  And by that I mean it was taken on the fly, but it was shot deliberately to create a particular mood, a sense of ambiguity and enigma.  The mirror is always the eternal metaphor for a sense of otherness, and here I’ve deliberately clipped the groom’s face so that it’s not a straight romantic reflection.  The image is mostly dark, the clipped face jars slightly and there’s an underwater feel to the colours and tones around them, so that the whole thing becomes a little dreamlike, in the morning light, there in a beautiful room hundreds of years old, filled with ghosts.

Technical details for the photography wonks:

Camera: Canon 5D MKIII

Lens: Canon 24mm 1.4

Aperture: f16

Shutter speed: 1/180

ISO: 2,500