Wedding wars! How photographers took over – and vicars fought back
by Emine Saner, Guardian:
While once there would be a lone photographer taking pictures of the happy couple, now videographers and ‘content creators’ are also invited to document the big day, and even the clergy have had enough.
Hiking to the top of the highest local peak in full wedding dress sounded dramatic, adventurous and romantic. A visual representation of feeling on top of the world; a jaunty juxtaposition between gorgeous wedding finery and the wilds of northern England. The resulting photographs were striking and memorable, recalls the photographer behind this scenario, Scott Johnson. The couple were lovely and it was one of his favourite jobs – but he wonders how their guests felt, having been left for two hours while they went off to hike up a hill. “You’re invited by the bride and groom to spend a day with them and they disappear, so I can see where the angst comes from,” he says. “But it’s what the couple wants, so we have to say yes.”
Johnson, in his 40s, says he is old enough to remember when his wedding photography jobs lasted around three hours – he was there to capture the arrival at the church or register office, shoot the ceremony and take portraits and photographs for an hour or so afterwards. “You didn’t do any bridal preparation, or stay for the party.” Now, he says, couples want coverage from early in the morning until midnight or later. “I used to just take one camera and one lens,” he adds; now he brings a van of equipment. “Couples are much more aware of what can be done than ever before.” And, anecdotally at least, many couples want much more. “Some want the more stylised coverage,” he says. “You see wedding photography online where you’re thinking, that’s not a wedding, it’s like a movie shoot.”
Some couples now want to be photographed on beaches at sunset, or clifftops, or up mountains. They want drones and multiple angles, and they employ “content creators” alongside the more traditional photographer. Wedding photographers are often working 16-hour days, barely stopping for a break, and under pressure to capture every detail. Then many couples want to see a preview of the photographs the next day. “There’s less patience, there’s less appreciation of quality,” says Lewis Fackrell, a wedding photographer based in south Wales.
That’s not their only problem. Earlier this year, Rachel Roberts, a wedding photographer, complained that vicars were making their jobs harder by restricting the type of photographs they could take in church, and in some cases banning them altogether. The petition she started, calling for a better working relationship and describing “rude, humiliating, aggressive and abusive” behaviour from some clergy members, has been signed by more than 1,200 people. It included a link to a TikTok video of one such incident, in which a priest stops mid-ceremony to tell the photographers to move away. “This is a solemn assembly, not a photography session,” he says firmly, as bride and groom look on nervously. Even Dr Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, stepped in, agreeing that some vicars can be “overcontrolling”, but adding that a church wedding “isn’t staged just as a spectacle to be filmed, but as a personal encounter of a couple with God”.
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