Sunday Musings: Your wedding is not important so quit taking pictures already!

I like collecting old photographs. There are several reasons:

 

- I don't like to consign social history to the round file.

 

- There were fewer photos (and other media) taken in the past than there are now, so images of ordinary life are

rarer.

 

- There are some periods and events in history which I like over others (I once had the privilege of looking at

prints of images taken by one of Hitler's photographers given to an acquaintance as a gift).

 

Most of the photos that I collect are of historically insignificant people. Yet I consider the photos worthwhile

keeping, especially if they're about significant events.

 

Nowadays, photography so cheap and ubiquitous and many photos are just happy snaps. But let's forget that and

look at the average wedding. Most folks, whatever their income, will go to lots of trouble to get a well made

wedding album.

 

But for what? All that money and effort for what? Is your life that important that it needs that level of care in

documenting it - or in documenting it at all? You think your descendants will care much? They'll have wedding

albums of their own to pass down to their descendants who will have wedding albums of their own...

 

It isn't that photographs are taken at weddings that's at issue. It's how and why they're taken. Whatever the

event, no matter how trivial, a good photo is better than a crap one. We all would like to look back at our lives

now and then. But surely we don't need to spend thousands to do this? I guess some people see it as social status

(read vanity) to have an expensive photographer at their wedding.

 

For me the image is most important. The subject serves the image. So the trivial can be made great via the

camera. Whatever the subject is doesn't matter: it's raw material for excellent photography.

 

Perhaps our desire to be immortal is responsible for our outlandish spending habits (weddings at least are for

the living, but can't the dead at least be dead in peace?).

 

So what say all of you?

My personal view, based on observation of a far from scientific sample, is that the photo album is too often the important thing - the wedding being simply the means to produce the album. The marriage thereafter is a pale shadow of the performance art event which it evidences.

 

But I'm probably just a cynic!

But for what? All that money and effort for what?

 

Karim, have you concidered asking "THEM" instead of "us" ?

My wife and I sometimes look back at our wedding pictures and reminisce. For various reasons, we had a very cheap photographer, and it shows--technically the pictures are not particularly good. They sit in a regular flip book. We have only one large print: a snapshot taken by my sister before the ceremony. Occasionally I wish we had hired a better (more expensive?) photographer. But the pictures do serve their purpose well; they remind us of the start of our marriage and where we were. Great events (at least to us) make trivial photography into great photography.

I think that weddings satisfy some primal need for society, something about uniting the couple (and I don't think it needs to be monogamous), families and friends at large. As such, the documentary evidence of same is an important reminder of that ceremony, the pledge, and, most importantly, the sharing. The price paid for the documentary evidence however, satisfies another primal need, that of keeping up with the Joneses...

You've really got nothing better to worry about other than whether folks happily enjoy their wedding albums? You don't want one? Don't buy one. I imagine I could look through your life and possessions and find things I would feel are trivial and meaningless. You might disagree.

Doesn't your argument contradict itself Karim? it sure seems to,

Over half of all marriages in the US end in divorce. Many of those wedding albums end up in the trash can.

Chastising Karim for expressing his ideas so well, and for daring to ask amusing and perhaps inconsequential questions (or maybe they're important) shows our era's dominant mantra: Don't express wonder or uncertainty. Click your heels and ignore.

 

Wedding videography is obviously supplanting wedding photography. It's at the center of high-end wedding businesses. But will the couple really sit through the results when they're 50-years-married? Or even after a year? Perhaps. My local newspaper's practice of showing 50 year anniversary portraits next to wedding portraits is enlightening. Nice to see how well lovers seem to bear the effects of age.

 

One of my favorite Minor White-student couples was married by Suzuki Roshi at the San Francisco Zen Center, along about 1968. Hubby and wifey were both fine photographers. He showed in significant galleries, she was already a successful painter as well (selling well at 24). Their wedding photo was a simple 4X5 B&W of themselves with the broadly grinning priest. One of the guests used the wife's Minolta TLR (120) to hold the moment. They displayed that print in their home studio niche for at least a decade, sometimes with a flower or incense. Eventually they parted, as many couples should. I don't know what's happened to them anymore, but I do remember that photo. I doubt I'd remember a video...because videos don't commonly sit quietly in niches, waiting 24/7 to be noticed.

The two most important photographs I own are my parents' wedding photo and my grandmother's portrait taken at the

time of her high school graduation (with a little hand coloring added at the time).

 

When a photo preserves personal history, it often goes beyond adjectives like good, tacky, overdone, cliche. Family

snapshots, wedding pictures, Bar Mitzvah albums are often about love, memories, experiences heard about but not

witnessed, elders long gone sharing joy, generational connectedness, roots.

 

"For me the image is most important. The subject serves the image."

 

While I imagine that to be the case in many instances, it's rarely the case for me. I very often have a hard time

separating subject and image in terms of my emotional involvement with photos, both my own and others.

I did not take pictures at my wedding, except one. I put a pinhole camera in the corner and opened the shutter for several hours. Everyone else was snapping away. Some of them sent us pictures. They were so bad that I don't like to look at them. I agree, my wedding was not important (except to the two of us).

I am commenting on the statement "You think your descendants will care much?" some people are sentimental, including me. History is interesting, especially when it is our own history.

I have alot of old family photos and I do genealogy as a hobby, I would love to get ahold of my ancestors wedding photos.

 

I didnt have a photographer at my wedding, just regular snapshots....they are crappy but I do love them anyway :D

To some people, yes, their wedding is that important. My parents are a good example:

 

My father and stepmother couldn't afford a professional photographer at their wedding, which was a low-key affair

held in a friend's home. They each handed their cameras to friends and got the best photos they could afford.

These photos were mounted in an inexpensive album that had pride of place in their living room for 20 years. As

a 20th anniversary gift, my father had a professional album made for my stepmother, with new prints scanned from

the negatives and bound up in a beautiful white leather album. In essence, he gave her the album he wished he

could have paid a professional to make in 1983. Yes, they would still be married even without the album, but I

know they curl up on the sofa together and page through their wedding album fondly, even after 25 years. Not bad

for a second marriage.

 

On the other hand, my mother and stepfather were married by a justice of the peace and had no honeymoon, no

guests, no money, and no reception. Obviously, no photos were taken. Twenty years later they're still together

and regularly request I bring my camera for visits, because I seem to capture them at their best together. They

wish -- often -- that they had more photos from the early years of their marriage, and had they been able, yes,

they would have had a professional photographer as well.

 

I tend to frown on extravagance in general, but I also consider it none of my business how people spend their

hard-earned money. Those professional albums and photographers charge a lot because they're judged to be worth it.

"over half of all weddings end in divorce"

 

Probably would be interesting to see a "Divorce Album." Here's you cheating on me. Here's me letting the dirty dishes pile

up. Here's your umpteenth parking ticket. Awww, there's our first look at our credit report together. Look at that shock,

wasn't it adorable? ;-)

The truth is that events considered important in cultural terms are never really important events in your life: ie. they never really change your life in any significant way. True life changing events are always approached as being unimportant and insignificant, yet their consequences are the ones that change the course of your life.

 

My marriage was not nearly as important as where I chose to sit in the Sociology class that day I first met my wife. We have been together for over 40 years and married for 38.

 

Our wedding was just a formality that needed to be done. We were already living together and had made promises to each other that the wedding vows just repeated. Nothing changed.

 

But that decision to sit next to a friend that resulted in the introduction to the young woman who is now my closest friend was life altering. The question to me is, how can I manage to recognize those truly life changing moments and get pictures of THEM? I think that's why old snapshots have such meaning. They are often of trivial events, but they actually do remind us about and metaphorically represent what we know to be truly important: life's little, insignificant acts of kindness and of love.

 

We actually have very few pictures of our wedding, and I don't think they have been looked at in years.

My in-laws paid for our wedding and they had a fine one as we did our duty at the altar. We have an album full of wedding pictures, but I can't remember the last time I looked at it. This year it will be 40 years of marriage.

 

Customs change as the years pass. Now if you don't have a full blown wedding with all the right stuff, you're not keeping up with the Jones. Peer pressure is a strange thing, especially when it continues into adulthood. Now folks want video and stills of the big event. The stills will last, but how well the video? I've seen DVDs degrade in a couple of years.

I took my own photos on my wedding day. Photography is simply too ingrained into my life to be any other way. For the ceremony, I handed out every camera I owned to anyone in the audience who I thought had an ounce of composition skill. Along with my photographer friends who were in attendance (and who brought their cameras because they wanted to, though I didn't ask them to), this created a record of the day that couldn't be bought at any price.

 

For me, the memory of making images of my wedding day is as important as the result. But then again, that has always been the point for me. I enjoy making images. I leave the displaying up to others. If a friend or family member wants to display an image of mine, that is just great. But for me it is enough to know that they exist.

 

Those of you who are married to non-photographers will understand how this puts me in a bit of a quarrel with my wife. She can't believe that she is married to a very good photographer, and yet has virtually no images or albums on display in her house.<div></div>

"Most folks, whatever their income, will go to lots of trouble to get a well made wedding album."

 

Many will also go to the trouble to buy a BMW, Manolo Blahniks, or a McMansion (10,000 sq ft houses bought by empty nesters are particularly paradoxical). But that's how it goes. Individuals get to define their own values even while following the crowd. No one ever said that ordinary life, absent a guiding creed makes any sense, and even with the most stringent of value systems, in the end we're usually left with wishful remembrance. When and if I 'meet my maker' my brief will be that I was no more or less a fool than anybody else.

Josh, I love the jacket! However, many years ago I swore I would never shoot a wedding. So far I've managed to keep that promise to myself. Even my own wedding was off limits.

 

I have however, shot a couple of funerals. It wasn't planned, but family members knew my cameras were never far away. They asked. I shot. Strange experience!

Ellis, yes, you're right. It's a matter of degree I suppose.

 

John, I don't sense much chastisement - after all I'm posting in the Philosophy forum! If I chose to put this on Casual Converstions... I might have to deal with a lot of people on their high horses.

 

Everyone else: I hear you. And I appreciate it. You may not agree one way or another but at least you know where I'm coming from.

 

If I may recapitulate (see, in this forum we use WHOLE words hahah): you want photos at your wedding etc? A fine thing by anyone's standards. But if you really think it (or you) is so important that it's a must-do by a pro who's going to likely give you overdone, over-processed results and charge you a packet for it: you're doin' it wrong.

 

Do things because of love, not because of any other reason. Is love the purest of motivations? I think so.

 

Buy Jeff's hypothetical BMW: and when the oil's hot enough, rev the crap out of it. That's what it's made to take. Don't pussy-foot about with it every third Sunday and be afraid to go above 3,000rpm. ;-)

 

Oh, and Josh: did you *really* wear *that* shirt? :-P

 

Sometimes I wonder if I am correctly articulating what I'm thinking. Sure hope so!

I think far too many photographs are taken at weddings now. 50 - 100 in an album is

plenty.<BR><BR><BR><I>Nowadays, photography so cheap and ubiquitous and many photos are just happy

snaps.</I><BR><BR>As were most old photographs which are now seen as interesting. What may have been a

boring, run of the mill shot fifty years ago is now interesting due to changes such as clothing, transport, buildings,

etc.

A) It was a tuxedo, not a shirt.

 

B) I absolutely wore it. I'm not sure when I will ever own a cooler outfit.<div></div>

Karim,when I read your post at first it came across as a liitle bit misogynistic. Not really, but it sounded

that way. I don't think you meant it so. But your are degrading the occasion by the tone of your arguments.

 

Weddings have become overblown, we all know that. Guests flown to tropic isles, name bands, the whole shebang.

(The photography part is a minor percentage and is getting less as a percentage I betcha). In sociology class

they said that matrimony is at its core the "institutionalization of sex." Even if you buy that rude concept, it

is a ritual that has to be documented. Aren't all rituals documented?

 

In olden days,before photography,before anything but painted miniatures, they held out stained bedclothes for the

court to see the next day...weird huh. we have at least progressed to something more decorous, personal,more

artistic, more sharable with the extended family who couldn't make the five thousand mile trip. As we see p34

Josh's personalized attire, it gets to be a statement of personality and a fun event to boot. Not the joining of

two lineages so much... Those are the times of life we want to document when the champagne buzz is all gone.

Anyway, feel free to have your wedding at Chuckeecheese and get a buddie to take the pictures ad hoc. Me, I went

the whole nine yards. A fifty dollar sailor from the base with my film camera and Black and White- de rigeur and

budget too..(.I wore my dress uniform and had the sword routine of course.).

 

But to settle this, let us hear from the ladies! The are the ones who doll up and deserve quality photographie. gs

If love,as you correctly assert, is the "purest of emotions," does it not follow that the highest testament to

its formal declaration deserves high level photography?

 

My folks eloped and were married in a court room in NYC but they posed later for a marriage portrait. It tells an

interesting 1920's story. I'll give you the gist some day. An immigrant tale.

<i>Is your life that important that it needs that level of care in documenting it - or in documenting it at all? </i><P>People will go to almost any length to preserve their own lives. Surely this suggests how important they believe their lives to be.