A Wedding Day ditty

A couple of months ago I wrote about how I aspired to incorporating more documentary-style images into my wedding photography.  Ever since (in fact, even before I wrote about it) I’ve been looking out for those moments to capture, and when I manage to do so, it’s a mini personal triumph.  Last Thursday I was the guest at a wedding in the venue where I myself got married – Dunmore House, near Clonakilty in West Cork – and it was a chance to put my own guide to wedding photography for guests into action, while also seek out those types of moment.  My favourite moment, it occured to me as I looked back on my photos afterwards, wasn’t very “documentary” in its setting, but I love the many stories that the picture that captures it manages to tell.  That picture is above.  The moment is described below.

The photo was captured during the evening reception, long after the meal and even after the first dance – with the official photographer long since gone home. In fact, the photo itself tells when it was captured – look at the groom and you can see he has a plate of food – sausages, sandwiches and cake – on his lap.  The band had taken their break while tea was being served.

It’s clear from the photo however that something is going on, and what I love about this shot is the range of expressions and interactions between the people in it.  The bride and groom laughing; the priest getting in on the joke; the kids cross-legged on the floor, a mixture of bored, bemused, amused and not quite sure what’s funny; the family and friends looking at the groom, who seems, the more you look around the photo, to be the subject of whatever is going on; the man clinking the woman’s glass in the background as if to acknowledge some part she played in the proceedings; even the few people right at the back seemingly unaware of all the goings-on.

What was going on was this.  The groom’s uncle hails from Killorglin, and it is tradition in that town now that each year there is a pantomime held which takes over the whole town, and it is this uncle which pretty much organizes it.  Each year he plays the “dame” in the panto, and during the interval appears on stage to recite a ditty, for want of a better word, which tells of events in the town, the country and the world over the previous 12 months, and which has a chorus that is pretty well known by now to all who see the panto each year.   For the occasion of his nephew Shay’s wedding to Sinead, he had composed a ditty for the big day and was in full flight as I captured this photo.

The previous image I took adds enough context to make this all a bit more obvious, but doesn’t have the same impact as the photo at the top of this post.

Why I feel this photo wasn’t very documentary in its setting is that I tend to think of documentary images as “stolen” shots, and while this photo was clearly captured without drawing the attention of anyone in the frame, I was far from discrete when I took it.  I had moved (for the previous shot) behind the focus of everyone’s attention to grab that contextual photo, thereby putting me in everyone’s field of view, so when I turned my camera from the focus of their attention to the spectators themselves, I could have found that the final image would have had many pairs of eyes looking straight into my lens.  The fact that I bounced flash off the ceiling to lift the exposure should have only exacerbated this.  Instead I (fortunately) timed my capture well enough that the ditty and its delivery were amusing enough to remove all attention from me and allow me to capture about as natural a photograph as I would think you could see.

And the best part?  I would be pretty certain that everyone in the frame, without even seeing the previous photo that puts it in context, would know exactly when it was taken and what was going on as soon as they saw it.  It’s a memory captured, not created – one of the key requirements of a documentary image.