Why We Don’t Call Ourselves Storytellers

A lot of wedding photographers like to call themselves storytellers – and this is absolutely no shade to the ones that do. But the term has never felt quite right for our own work. This puzzled us for a while, but the heart of it is that we’ve always had the persistent, lingering knowledge that these aren’t our stories to tell. They’re yours. It’s your life, your partnership, your community, your family – not ours. Storytelling implies some act of creation – of making a story and deciding how it should be told. We don’t create stories and we don’t want to change anything about yours.  We are there to document your story in all its complexity and truth – not the version of it we think is the prettiest

Because weddings are more than pretty.  Sure, they are beautiful and they are happy. But they can also be intense and overwhelming. Along with the happy and the love can be grief, comedy, boredom, anxiety, and every other human emotion. The beauty mingles with everything else and this joyful, messy tangle of feelings is your story. And we want to document all the parts of it as they truly happened – not just the ones that are pretty. Wedding days are celebrations of love but they are also celebrations of what it means to be humans in community with one another, and every aspect of those stories deserves to be told.

So if we’re not storytellers, what are we? At the core, we like to think we are custodians of precious memories. It is a responsibility we take seriously. We are people who are privileged to witness the intimacy of all kinds of communities. Hopefully, we are people who document the truth of what happens on wedding days. We aspire to be that, anyway.

The Journal

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