My photographic art, and my photography business couldn't be further from each other. My day to day work as a Wedding and Portrait photographer see's me working closely with family's and sometimes in very intimate ways. In the studio we capture their portraits, we try to understand them and create moments that reveal their personalities individually and collectively. Weddings see me enter their homes and take photos of them while getting ready for a day that many around them will describe as the biggest and most important day of their life's. I capture them as while they are still in their pyjamas, before the dress and the shoes and the makeup. I then follow them throughout the day, I stand at the alter with them sometimes less than a meter away as they say their vows to their partner in front of a crowd of their nearest and dearest. Later on that day I will take them for romantic photos, sharing their first walk as a married couple, their first meal, their first dance. I capture them as they sit and wait, as they cry. Emotional and vulnerable, stripped.
My photographic art in the past has been a million miles away from this visual and contextual, and as I delve deeper into my current project the gap seems to widen ever further. The bright and airy depiction of the lovers first kiss is contrasted to a point of near comedy when I produce an image in the early hours of the morning under a damp bridge where I shoot a path leading into the darkness, or with my recent shoots as I stand in the darkness capturing long raw exposures of sordid acts between men.
The link between the two is vulnerability. Working with people at a time when all their armour has been stripped away and they are left bare in front of the camera. How I conduct myself, how I talk to people, is very similar in these situations. I feel the need in both contexts to reassure the people I am working, let them know that it doesn't matter if it goes wrong, they wont look bad. I try to help them relax, tell a joke and get the shots. Even in the dark with the guys in the studio, I couldn't help but crack a joke or too when I tripped over some wiring or a wayward light stand, and the unexpected laughter broke the ice for all three of us, in very much the same way it does when the registrar accidentally says the wrong name during the ceremony. The tension is lifted and the armour is no longer needed, and now we can simply be who we are without fear, and its now that the photos become truth.
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