Wedding Photography

Wedding Photography

The importance of the reportage

Have you ever wondered why we are so passionate about Wedding Photography at WhiteLoopStudio?

I’ve also been giving it some thought lately and this blog is a great opportunity to share my view with you all.

To be completely honest I must confess that, back in the days when I was a Photography student at a London college and was eager to perfect my technique with the help of the excellent teachers I was lucky to be taught by,  I never consider Wedding Photography to be my future.

And to be even more honest, in those years, Wedding Photography was considered to be a rather basic branch of modern photography, lacking  imagination and creativity.

In short, the Wedding Photographer was considered not only by me but also   by all of my schoolmates to be the lowest possible profession a photographer could aspire to.

First Dance, view from the roof

Photography for me has always been rather an Art and photos were thus destined to be exhibited in galleries or to be beautifully printed in specialised magazines and glossy photography books. Amongst all the aspects of photography that fascinate me, the most attractive has always been its strong link with anthropology, the honesty with which human behavior is exposed and made visible whilst being contextualised. In one sentence: the photo reportage.

But then, why do I do what I do today? Why do I take pictures at weddings?

Well, luckily in little more than a decade, Wedding Photography has radically changed, also thanks to the clients’ sensitivity, developing some truly fascinating aspects for any photographer.

Wedding Photography today is not just a sequence of static and repetitive images to stick in an album but can become a collection of unique and beautiful images.

Photographers who work at weddings are often landscape photographers or amazing portrait photographers, they can also be absurdist designers or colours masters, bizarre inventors or light technicians, architects or, here we are, photo reporters!

Wedding Photography has opened its doors to all the different wonderful genres of photography as a whole, allowing many artists behind the lenses to bring along and express their full potential in terms of creativity and instinct.

In a Wedding photoshoot we can identify photos of meticulously executed details, landscape photos where the newlyweds are harmoniously included , or portraits that will make the masterpieces at London’s National Portrait Gallery pale in comparison.

Bride Portrait

The wedding photographer, however, can not and should not excel in all these aspects. Each artist appreciates and promotes the genre which is closer to his heart.

Well, all of us at WhiteLoopStudio are huge reportage fans, which is to say that we live every marriage as the expression of spontaneous and unscripted human emotions.

For us going to a wedding is to discreetly take a closer look at how human feelings are manifested. We want our photos to speak to you directly and without filters, telling true stories!

Sometimes we delight in details, in portraits, but customers don’t come to us for this or that individual picture. When a future bride and future groom choose us it is because they know that we will not try to customize reality for a beautiful wall print, but because we will carefully tell through our photos the tale of a most important day.

This is where the reportage comes in. We would not do this job if we had to do it in any other way and I consider this to be at the core of the choice of a Wedding Photographer. The customer has to know what he or she wants and cannot expect the photographer to just do what he will be asked to. Unless, that is, you contract the good old photographer that has taken wedding photos for the whole family since the Forties. The Wedding Photographer is a creative artist and finds inspiration in the client!

I admire a lot of my colleagues for how they can produce immaculate images of beauty, using lights, shadows, poses, landscapes, postproduction. I believe that it is important to be inspired by each and every artist and continue to understand how this kind of photography evolves. I would like to mention some masters who are inspiration for many of us, between others Chrisman Studios and the Two Mann Studio, but also Fer Juaristi.

This is now a very versatile and truly creative form of art and Wedding Photographers are certainly no longer ranked in the lowest category. I like to think that each of us, in turn, can be an inspiration for others as well since we all have our own unique point of view and style.

I think that diversity enriches us and makes the whole of humanity fascinating.

The only goodr re repicture of my wedding – courtesy of Thomas Bertacche, a friend!

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