me and john doing the photo booth thing
Last weekend, I helped to shoot a wedding with friend and photographer, John Dolan. Our conversations turned to the inevitable: "what is it about a wedding?".
It's a happy event, of course, and there is always tons of joy and beauty but, I think, there are two kinds of beauty. There are the details; lovely clothes, pretty silverware, etc. but there is a second kind of beauty, more complex, even sublime, that has nothing to do with the outsides of the guests and bride and groom. This beauty is all about their insides - a sort of emotional beauty that both heightens and deepens the way that we experience the day.
This second beauty exists in the unspoken knowledge that this event might not have happened if conditions weren't just so - if the bride and groom had never met, if one decided that some little thing about the other person required too much of a sacrifice for the other to make, if, if, if. But yes, yes, yes, they have arrived at the mutual decision to knit their stories together with the official ceremony of marriage and it's perfect. Or almost so. Their pleasure is felt all the more keenly because of those who are perhaps not there in person due to illness or death, but they are there, remembered and honored for their part in bringing these two into the world and together. Their happiness is experienced through the weight of witnessing the fragile lives of some of those who are able to attend. Their joy is perhaps a little tentative, not because of any lack of love, but because this union is a symbol of promise and hopefulness so personal and intimate that even though they are in the presence of family and friends that love them, they feel the vulnerability of their exposed dreams.
So it's more than just a party. And that's what we went there to take pictures of.
Beautiful. And, yes.
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