Every so often, I’d be standing at a wedding-day toast, and someone would say, “When your dad said last night…” and I would think, dammit. I was hearing the callback without ever having heard the joke.
I did not realize how much that had been bothering me until it stopped.
A little kid ran up to me at a wedding a few months ago and said, “Hey, it’s you again.”
I’d photographed the luncheon, the rehearsal, and dinner. And it hit me that this kid did not think of me as the photographer. She was not excited to see me. She was just acknowledging that I was apparently part of the furniture now.
I keep coming back to that word. Familiar.
Somewhere between Friday night and Sunday brunch, everybody stops introducing themselves.
What I didn’t realize for a long time was that the transformation wasn’t just happening to me. It was happening to everyone.
On Friday night, the bride’s college roommate is meeting an aunt for the first time. On Sunday morning, she is asking her how her flight is tomorrow. The Boston contingent knows the California contingent by name. The kid’s father knows which of the groomsmen made her laugh at the rehearsal dinner. Nobody planned any of this. It just happens because you cannot spend three days in the same rooms with the same people and stay strangers.
A single-day wedding is a room full of people who love the couple and mostly do not know each other. A Sunday morning at the end of a weekend wedding is a room full of people who now sort of know each other. Not deeply. Just enough for them to be eating together instead of leaving in a hurry.
By Sunday brunch, nobody thinks of me as the photographer anymore. Not because they trust me more than they did on Friday. They trust me the same. It is just that I am not new. The maid of honor sits down next to me and tells me a story about the bride from college that has nothing to do with anything I am going to photograph. She just wants to tell it, and I happen to be there.
I used to think a wedding started on Saturday morning.
I do not think that anymore.
Anyhow, this is why I love full weekend photography coverage.
