Shooting the Wedding

...Or perhaps too much technology has filled photographers with creative lethargy...

...In addition, proportionately fewer people are getting married, and among those who are, the tendency is to have camera-owning friends or relatives record the event...

...Ambience varies a great deal at weddings...

...That is, there is no way the crassest sensibility Given technical expertise and the right light can spoil a good subject...

...Frequently the parents?mothers in particular eclipse the offspring in both beauty and elegance...

...Weddings may not imply the universe, but they are very helpful in deducing fashions in behavior and esthetics as well as clothes...

...In an oil-painted photo of a bride against an imaginary sky (1955), the seated figure appeared to be standing, and to be suffering from steatopygia to boot...

...In selecting postwar work, Norfleet bore down rather heavily on the lower classes and on the misshapen, as if she shared the disdain felt for these types by the late Diane Arbus and her mentor, Lisette Model...

...The problemif indeed the photographer saw it as such was to arrange six or seven young women and children compactly and still display, not too ostentatiously, their dresses...

...A curious detail about Irish-Catholic weddings is the way the congregation, complete with raincoats and umbrellas, invariably looks to have dropped in uninvited...

...it has driven brides into costumes that project either a mix of Oriental and American Indian influences, or rural simplicity, Ozark-style...

...Despite the relative spontaneity of candids, I have noticed that people compose themselves just as carefully for these as they once did for the old time exposures, affecting expressions and arabesques of arrested motion...

...Considering the slim and repetitive pickings in the wedding field, slipping into the anthropological stance was probably unavoidable...

...Thus the spectacle of a rich man at ease in his own tails inevitably makes a better shot than a poor man struggling to close the gaps endemic to rented formal wear...

...Another beautiful group was taken by Martin Schweig of St...

...The situation has not been helped by the experiments of art photographers, notably those influenced by Surrealism...

...On the other hand, Italians tend to make a bigger splash, with shots of stag lines and the bride on the floor, her maids' bouquets rampant on her outspread skirts...

...Still, the pictures of two obese young women in long white satin suits, the jailhouse wedding between Sue Lyon and an incarcerated Gary Adamson, and the gross man mugging in a bridal veil all could have been resisted...

...each man stood suavely hipshot, holding his top hat and looking at the partner on his arm...

...So much so that future observers may conclude that the latter part of this century was an era of unbearable animation...

...The ICP show in New Yorkmounted by Barbra Norfleet, curator of photography at Harvard's Carpenter Center for the Visual Artsimplies that notwithstanding all the marvelous equipment now available, it is close to impossible to get what was once commonplace: a straightforward, dignified account of the marriage ritual...

...Generally speaking, the grandparents come off the best in these studies unless they have been manipulated into undignified poses...

...Color coordination has been a parallel trend, prompting grooms and ushers to appear in jonquil, aqua or pink suits with frilly shirts to match...

...Professionals with no delusions of artistry have assured me that since the process is wholly mechanical, a wedding picture should in theory be no worse than the scene it depicts...

...Bradford Bachrach has rightly observed that formality is more a requirement of ethnic groups nowadays, and this makes their pictures richer viewing than most...

...Another mystery: Photographer Frank Ferrario was quoted at the ICP show as saying that men are not interested in pictures, yet it is almost always the men who guide the camera to their best facial angles...

...Louis, shortly after World War I at a guess...

...One of the most eloquent pictures I have ever seen consisted of mother and bride facing each other in profile: The one, aquiline and quite handsome, was gazing ecstatically into the antrums of the other's surgically edited nose...

...It may be that an awareness of how many people there are in the world has crippled the ability to give and receive genuine individual attention...

...It is depressing to see an ancient woman togged out in turquoise and sequins being wheeled by a young man around the dance floor...

...One of the loveliest pictures in the exhibit, dating from the 1890s, featured ushers and bridesmaids in a stately chorus line winding down a foyer decorated with palms...

...My own favorites among these include the ghastly substance (named "silk" by some promotion genius) that replaces matt paper, and a texturing process that gives prints all the charm of embossed linoleum...

...I should mention, though, a fine 1965 study of a couple by Clem Harbutt: Exhausted, the woman sits on her husband's lap, in a disordered apartment lit by uncurtained windows...

...While the man behind the camera finally decides what will be in the picture (often to the point of man handling the bride and groom and their guests into tried and true positions), his work varies according to prevailing circumstances...

...At other times, the parents, though triumphant in demeanor, look...

...By the way, if candid wedding shots are at all indicative, to survive women today must steer between the Scylla of nose surgeons who transform victims into rehabilitated burn victims, and the Charybdis of beauticians hellbent on dying hair the color of new pennies...

...The shot of two homosexuals getting hitched by a clergyman belonged in another show altogether...

...At the ICP, there were plenty of black-and-white instances of what such an operator and his flash can do...

...Nevertheless, the medium and its practitioners should not be held entirely responsible for the inadequacy of the contemporary product...

...Whatever the reason, photographs from allegedly more leisurely eras are redolent with the energy and concentration so conspicuously missing from our own time...

...By the end of the '60s, there can hardly have been a wedding album that did not include at least one suburban revolutionary giving the peace sign...

...Naturally, I am not talking about "creative" photography where, doubtless, the reverse would apply...

...The Jewish ritualthe canopy, the crushing of the glass, the escorting of the bride down the aisle by both parentsis possibly more affecting and certainly more visible than the Catholic...

...It showed, too, that even if photography has won its spurs as a high art form, both public taste and general practice are on the whole poor...

...Commercial pictures are often uninspired, and costs can rival those of the wedding breakfast itself...

...What the ICP exhibit did not emphasize (and what may be impossible to show without considerable research) is the effect of photography itself on behavior...

...It seems to me, in fact, that hacks are frequently stimulated by the sight of wealth and elegance...

...Meanwhile, the photo industry continues to do everything possible to fan the flames of kitsch by coming up with technical "improvements" for the wedding album...

...shriveled beyond their years from the sheer effort of nurturing and finally launching their sleek offspring...

...Given the proliferation of photography and the vast appetite people continue to exhibit for their own likenesses, it remains a mystery why As in portrait paintingno rapprochement seems possible between patrons of sensibility and competent creators...

...Color film has been a godsend for the mediocre craftsman: For one thing, it helps to establish that the scene under survey is a party and not a murder investigation...

...Accustomed as one is to media heroes grinning for no reason other than that they are on camera, it is still odd to come upon picture after picture of brides, grooms, parents and guests standing around laughing uproariously, as if in response to an offstage comedian...

...There seems no point in itemizing the crotch shots (caused by the photographer kneeling, photo journalist style) of stout old ladies planted on chairs, the studies of couples with their wedding loot and/or luggage, or the honeymoon innuendo pictures...

...It has taken the post-World War II innovation of "candids," however, to unmask totally the photographer with what Wilfred Sheed has called "a tin eye...

...There is likewise reason to suspect that processors are as susceptible to subject matter as they are to camera technique either that or printing flaws do not rain down with equal justice...

...But none of this should be taken as a defense of a business that has for the most part fallen very low...

...Human warmth is another common theme in the nuptial package, as when the bride is "caught" scooping up some child, or embracing her old black nanny...

...Their innovations have been garbled by commercial operators, resulting in such conceits as the pictorial embalming of happy couples in wineglasses and the super imposing of wedding scenes on the sheet music of, say, "Strangers in the Night...

...SHOOTING THE WEDDING BY VIVIEN RAYNOR LITTLE more than a century old, wedding photography is already on the way out as a specialized occupation A victim of professional disregard and the hazards of mass production...

...From the few samples I have seen, pictures of black affairs are the most formal of all, paying great attention to arrangement of furniture, ornaments, etc...

...The results may be wrongly exposed, but will at least show some interest in the subject...

...The rage for naturalness is also noticeable...

...Bachrach's 1929 study of a couple in evening dress had a similarly tranquil quality, but the studio's productions have since degenerated into excessively retouched blandness...

...The signature of the Schweig studio in those days was soft light, a meditative atmosphere and a sense of the subject discovered rather than posedAn instance of art photography exercising a benign influence on the commercial...

...A recent historical survey at the International Center of Photography (ICP) was not a requiem for the genre (studios such as Bachrach are still collecting tidy fees from it), but it reinforced one's impression that wedding photographers, like portrait painters, are having an increasingly tough time...