I worked for 25 years as a newspaper photojournalist. Ten years ago when I walked out of a newspaper office for the last time and began a new professional life shooting weddings, I think many of my photographer friends probably thought I was nuts.
Why leave a profession that is said to be about documenting important and sometimes historic moments of our time, to enter the Wedding World that television "reality" shows would have us believe is full of bridezillas, where photographers shoot group shots, group shots, and more group shots?
Perhaps the pictures you see here will be a visual answer to the above question. A young couple whose wedding I shot several years ago recently contacted me and asked if I’d shoot the baptism of their second child (they’d wanted me to do pictures for them when their first child was baptized, but I wasn’t available that day.) So Sunday I was in church, quietly photographing a Catholic Mass that was both solemn and joyful--two of the emotional qualities that photojournalists seek in their work and their images. In short, I was doing photojournalism.
Yes, there was a point in the day (as there is at the weddings I shoot) when I also took a couple of family group pictures. My clients request a few of those and I’m happy to oblige, as family pictures too are a kind of documentation. But it’s the real-life photographic “moments” that this young couple knew I would record for them, because--in my case anyway--once a photojournalist, always a photojournalist.
