What Makes a Documentary Wedding Photograph Great?

 

Us documentary wedding photographers don’t just do it for a job you know. It’s almost an obsession we have. So when we’re not shooting pictures or making the best of them in the processing or designing albums and making prints, we’re reading about what we do and talking to other like minded obsessives. We do talk face to face and on the phone but we also talk through Twitter, Facebook and on Forums.

 

At the weekend one of our colleagues posed a hypothetical question to one of the forums, he asked. “What makes a documentary wedding photograph great?”

He knows the answer but it made for an interesting discussion I thought my opinion on it might be of interest to some others so here goes:

 

Unlike other more contrived wedding photography, reportage wedding photography is rarely about a single image. However I will try to answer the question as it was asked, I might have to mention context though.

…Well, as always, in my opinion.

The key difference between a great documentary image and any grabbed candid is purpose. The image should have a reason for its existence. We often edit out pictures because they no longer have a reason to exist. If the image doesn’t communicate it’s a waste of “film?”.

Now, in order to achieve its purpose each image should possess sufficient elements to make clear its message. One of those elements is context, sorry, back to the single image thing then… You know that HCB tells this so much better than me…

“…Sometimes there is a unique picture whose composition posses such vigour and richness, and whose content so radiates outward from it, that this single picture is a whole story in itself. This is rare…” 

Henri Cartier-Bresson 

Next are all the elements that we pick up on when we say, wow that is such a great image. Light yes, expression yes, composition yes, processing yes, colour yes, body language yes… Lots of others as well. All of those elements that when you look at an image in isolation of its context says to you that is a great image, all have purpose. Through those devices, the image transports you to the event, into the mind of the protagonists and the author (I’ve used literary references on purpose). An experienced journalistic wedding photographer sees an event develop that he/she knows is going to be loaded with narrative and intuitively arranges the 4 edges of the frame to allow all of the above to be possible.

Some more traditional wedding photographers have argued that the spontaneous, intuitive nature of the way we work is like making “snapshots”. I wrote an essay when I was studying, that attempted to define the snapshot and talked about how history is contrived by the snapshot, how our lives are not truthfully recorded by the snapshot. Look through your family album, the pictures are posed, usually engaging the camera, usually smiling, often your Mum brushed your hair and rubbed your face with a spit soaked handkerchief. In fact, when you look at it that way, traditional wedding photography has much more in common with the snapshot than documentary wedding photography.

 

As HCB says great documentary photography is rarely about the single image.

Our profession has traditionally had standards set by photographic awarding bodies. These organisations set their standards in the tradition of the Photographic society (now the RPS) and the Brotherhood of the Linked Ring (now the London Salon), the Victorian formalisation of our craft/art. Those two, in turn borrowed from painting, Fibonacci and all that. So we are often judged on a single image. Those organisations don’t know how to judge a documentary image because a good documentary image is greater than the sum of its parts but only in the context of other images.

While classical wedding photography owes much to the tradition of painting what we do is more akin to literature, film and theatre. Very difficult to sum it all up in one image. As practitioners we recognise single great documentary images because we understand the events the image portrays and are aware of the context by experience. Fortunately so do most people that have ever have been to a wedding.

Great documentary wedding photography is about communicating emotion.

It is the light and shade that lets the integrity of a documentary approach shine through.

On any given wedding day there are a full range of emotions on display and I reckon we include as many images of crying Mums as we do of laughing Grooms.

On the other hand we avoid the unflattering angles and expressions like the plague. It’s all in the timing. A good wedding portraitist (that’s what I’ll call a wedding photographer who contrives pictures) will pose the subject in the best light, they will move and tweak to get the body language right, they’ll tease the expression, make tiny adjustments to the fabrics all with the ultimate aim of producing an image that any Bride or Groom will be happy to hang on their wall.

True Reportage wedding photographers, on the other hand, watch, wait and position themselves until the subject moves into the light, positions herself, sometimes just for a tiny fraction of a second, so that the body language says (writing this on Valentines day) “I love you.” If that happens in dramatic or flattering light and the expression says the same as the body language and the fabric hangs as it was designed to and the whole thing sits as a pleasing arrangement of tones and/or colours within the 4 edges of the frame, that’s a special documentary image.

Perfect contrived wedding photographs are simply helping what will occur naturally. Wedding Photojournalists on the other hand have to be alert to what is going to happen.

What we do is not easy to do well, that’s why there are far more doing it the other way.

 

That all brings us seamlessly to the ultimate definition of a great documentary wedding photograph, integrity.