The Zen of Wedding Photography

Mary B. writes: “Poor old wedding photographers often get bashed as non-artists... I just had to speak up for them/us.”

Let me speak up for you too. As I said somewhere above, “Professional artists are by definition folks who live by selling their art – wedding photographers, for example.” I wasn’t being flippant. As the sun sets on my fifteen minutes of fame, I’ll ride off praising the unsung heroes of photography – those whose work never turns up in museums because it doesn’t have a revolutionary message, those who sell a long day’s work for a few hundred dollars and won’t ever see one of their prints on sale for $17K in a Madison Avenue gallery. Those who get a salary from the local paper, or who spend their days in a studio photographing clogs and Barcaloungers for mail-order catalogs, or who (and a special star shines for them) coddle and sweet-talk red-faced parents and wet babies into poses fit for posterity.

Some of these folks turn out wonderful work and some don’t, but two things are certain: 1) If they didn’t exist, the rest of us would still be using Brownies and paying a week’s salary for a roll of film; and 2) admitting you’re a wedding photographer or a baby photographer, or that you do product shots or take pictures of dumpsters, is guaranteed to shrink you to the size of a microbe in artsy-fartsy circles.

A week ago I happened to be in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I transcribed these helpful hints from a gloss on the wall next to three fuzzy photos of women’s profiles: “In this work, Richard Prince deploys an array of strategies (rephotographing black and white advertisements using color film, cropping, enlarging, grouping according to gesture) to undermine the seeming naturalness and inevitability of the mass cultural image, revealing it to be a fiction of society’s desires.” What wedding photographer dare aim so high?