Andrea and Chris

She didn't have to say it. It was in the way she walked around him, they way she looked at him and the way she rested her head on him, Andrea felt safe around Chris.

After a half hour or so of shooting, that was part of what I started to see about them, about their relationship. And, to be honest, I didn't even really consciously think it during the shoot. What I saw, what I felt I guess, was just sort of a intuitive force, guiding where and how the photos started to come together.

Like most people who don't have professional pictures taken all the time, Chris and Andrea needed a little more direction as we got started. But gradually they relaxed and fell into just being Andrea and Chris, which is of course just what I'm looking for. Then I just gotta shaddup at let them be them... and work quickly enough to get those beautiful pictures as they start blooming and showering and scattering all around me.

 

Using a camera as a megaphone...

You know how the insurance company says to take pictures of the stuff in each of the rooms of your house? Well, my brother in law did just that, he does stuff like that. You know, stuff that ‘you’re supposed to do’, but most people never actually get around to doing. That’s just how he rolls. It was a long time ago, so I can’t remember how it is that I ended up seeing something so random of his.

Anyway, the images are etched in my mind as the most boring photos I’ve ever seen. Now, to be fair to Nate, he wasn’t trying to, like, express himself in the photos, they were just cold, banal documents that said, ‘look, this is my stuff’. But they did say that, they said something, even if it was a super boring something.

Now, think of the most gripping, engaging photos you have seen. Like maybe the National Geographic Afghan woman with the eyes. You probably know exactly which photo I’m talking about even before you scroll down, right? Why is that?

It’s so beautiful, so intense and electric. It’s so full of meaning because of how the photographer expressed himself in the photo. He’s shouting out, ‘look, there are real people here, they are human, and they are scared but they’re also resilient, tough. Just like you could be, just like you might be if your were here. Look, humanity’s spark is beautiful even when surrounded by awful circumstances. Look at the life and the beauty and the defiance in her eyes’.

Or maybe you see something else, but that’s the nature of art isn’t it, perception can be malleable, mercurial, as long as it’s authentic and powerful.

It’s really important for a photographer to know how to use his camera, But it’s so much more important for him to have something to say when he looks through the viewfinder.

photo by Steve McCurry

Diana and Jeremie

I have only one picture of my grandparents as young people. Just one. It's the day they were married.

They're standing arm in arm. My grandpa is draping his hand possessively on my grandma's hip. My grandma is squeezing him tight around his middle with one arm, the other folded demurely behind her waist.

I know their stories of course. I know how they were going to get married, packed and everything, and my grandpa was sent to prison for not going to war, despite being a conscientious objector. It would be three and a half years before he would get out and that picture could be taken, my grandma waiting for him the whole time. It shook my grandmother so deeply that to this day she can't tell the story all the way through.

Three and a half years apart, then they could be together. All the torrent of emotion that must have come and gone, like a massive and deliberate tide on some long and now lonely coast. The only thing I have connecting me to them at that time in their life is that solitary sepia photograph. It's priceless for it.

My family has always meant everything to me, and I heard those words exactly from the best man, Jeremie's brother, during his toast to them. You could tell that Diana and Jeremie were very much loved by their family, from Diana's mother's final touches just before the ceremony, to Jeremie's mother tenderly beaming during the mother-son dance, and everything in between.
 All of those images will be their legacy, their heirlooms.