Confessions From a Wedding Photography Bootcamp
How I started my photography career.
Welcome to In the Flash, a weekly, behind-the-lens dialogue on photography. To join the conversation
When I was 22 and starting out in wedding photography, an ex-bf who was a seasoned wedding pro gave me a stern warning. “Don’t do it,” he said. “No one goes on to have an art career after shooting weddings. It’s a trap.” Our relationship lasted for a minute and a half, but the ominous counsel lingered in my mind for years. Why were weddings such a career-killing dead-end? And could I prove his theory wrong?
By 25, I was living my best life. My career as a wedding photographer was booming. I was running a business out of my Brooklyn apartment and shooting 40 weddings per year. The money was great, the work was fun, and I got to travel around — destination weddings were my specialty. I was also becoming something of a celebrity, at least in the small post-Soviet ghetto of Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn (right next door to the more infamous Brighton Beach). I was the “It” girl for “documentary” wedding photography, a new fad in a community more accustomed to the heavily produced, posed style of established wedding studios. If the bride and groom wanted something edgier and were willing to piss off their parents, they came to me.
A few months ago, I wrote a post about weddings being the blue-collar bastard child of the photography world. The stigma my ex cautioned about turned out to be real. When I was trying to break through in the industry after art school, I was advised to erase my identity as a wedding photographer and never mention that in polite company. I made a new website, changed my email and deleted my wedding page. This post is a sort of a confession, a reclaiming of my sordid past as a wedding photographer.
............................
Weddings are a fantastic training ground for a photographer who’s just starting out. To this day, I rely on those skills in the most unexpected ways. I am often asked by magazines to work on complex shoots that involve both photojournalism and portraiture. Being fluid and able to easily morph from one style to another comes directly from my wedding days. Wedding photography is a mishmash of fashion, documentary, portrait and still-life, blurring the lines between what are often artificial and rigid genre boundaries.
Weddings also provided a bootcamp in speed and stamina. The usual day lasted for 12+ hours straight and, in that time, I had to create a seamless story, from an obscenely early morning photo of a dress hanging on the windowsill to the final, alcohol-fueled kiss of the newlyweds at 2 a.m. In between, there were inevitable disasters, nervous brides and tiny family tragedies. I was the gatekeeper of polishing all that drama into a seamless, magical narrative of the day. On top of that, having photographed over a hundred bridal parties in varying states of inebriation, I learned to take control of any situation and be able to direct a large group — just as I needed to do for a recent New Yorker shoot where I had to squeeze eight people into a vertical portrait.
Photographers’ contempt towards weddings has been slowly changing. Snubbing work that pays so well is a dangerous move in an industry where “work for exposure” is an accepted concept. When I transferred from weddings to editorial, I was shocked to discover that one wedding paid as much as a seven-day assignment for most established magazines. Being a wedding photographer may not sound as glamorous as freelancing for a prestigious newspaper like the New York Times, but one type of work will put you through art school — while the other will pay for your lunch.
My swan song as a wedding photographer came in 2017. A colleague of mine was getting married, and she asked me to shoot her wedding alongside one of my idols, Larry Fink. To work in the same space and on the same project as Larry, whose work is a constant source of inspiration and influence, felt to me like coming full circle. Looking through a decade of wedding photos for this post, I noticed what was at the time impossible to see — how the photography kept improving year from year and I was able to take on new challenges and take more interesting shots as time went on. It made me so nostalgic that I entertained a thought of shooting another wedding. Then, I remembered the unnaturally early wake-up calls and decided to let those adventures remain in the past.
Find me on Instagram, @dina_litovsky