What I strive for with every couple
A review from Jacob and Emma
“Before we found Amy, we had almost given up on the idea of hiring a photographer for our wedding. That's not an exaggeration — we'd decided that we'd rather trust our memory than hand the task over to a Wedding Photographer. (A Wedding Photographer: someone you hire to transform the faces of the people you love most in the world into oversaturated, flattened, Instagrammable versions of themselves.) We just wanted someone to take photos of our actual wedding, however it unfolded. This didn’t seem like a big ask; but after months of searching through “First Looks” and “Cake Cuttings” and moody shots of wedding dresses on hangers, we were beginning to think it was impossible.
Then we stumbled on Amy’s website, thank god. We knew immediately we had found someone special — but we didn't yet know how special. Now that the wedding is over, and half a year has passed, we’re beginning to understand how lucky we were.
In the blur of the wedding, Amy slowed everything down. Grounded, warm, thoughtful, genuinely empathic — the truth is that, even if she weren't a photographer, we would've wanted (needed?) her there. She let things develop naturally. Our worst fear about a Wedding Photographer was that they would pose us (“Your hand on top of her hand, now lean your heads together”) and demand affectionate glances (“Look up at him, let’s see a smile, very nice”). Amy understood that our affectionate glances — and our anxious glances, and our joyous glances — would come about BECAUSE WE WERE GETTING MARRIED. She didn’t need to prompt us or make us conform to some fake, pre-determined image of what love should look like. She never once took us out of the real moment we were sharing together. She just quietly and expertly documented it.
The result is extraordinary. This is not an album that we'll take down off the shelf every decade or two because it records an important event. It is an album we’ll look at all the time because it captures much more — not just everything that happened that day, but the individual essences of the people we love. Maybe in everyday life they go by too fast, these flashes, these moments when someone lets a piece of themselves shine through. Maybe we register these flashes intuitively, but we never actually see them, we never fully capture them. Amy somehow did. She found them in our cousins and brothers and best friends from childhood and fussy aunts and distant relations. And she found them in us.
(And yes, it needs to be said that Amy took the best photos of us that have ever been taken. We have 20+ years experience of looking embarrassingly awful in pictures. Amy's lens turned out to be the kiss that turned these frogs into a prince and a princess. But be warned: the effect is sadly temporary! When we saw ourselves in photographs from a friend's wedding a few months later — photos Amy DIDN'T take — the frogs were back again. But as we said, Amy has a talent for capturing essences; so who’s to say we’re not royalty after all?)
The cake is long gone, the dancing is over. And yet, as those 90s De Beers commercials used to say: ‘A diamond is forever.’ That’s how we feel about Amy’s photos. No diamonds on our wedding bands, but we have something much better.”
*I can’t thank Jacob enough for putting into words the experience I wish for each and every couple whose wedding I photograph. And if you were reading his review and thinking “Wow, he’s a great writer!”, you are not wrong. He recently published his first book of poetry, and if, like me, you love books and poetry and great writers, here is the link to the website where you can buy a copy!