Early in my career I spent a training day with a well-known luxury photographer. During one of the breaks, he mentioned, almost in passing, that some of his clients never came back to collect their photos.

They weren’t actually interested in the photographs. What they’d paid for was the ability to say he’d shot their wedding.

Hold that thought. 

I’ve been spending time recently in luxury wedding forums on Reddit — lurking, listening, occasionally getting involved. And one thing comes up again and again on the subject of photography: couples questioning whether they’re missing something. They don’t connect with the work, but their planner has recommended the £10k photographer. Should they book him anyway? Is there a value they just can’t see?

(My answer is usually: find something that genuinely resonates with you, or work out what does and tell your planner. But that’s a different article.)

The bigger question is what does luxury actually mean in wedding photography? Because I’m not sure it means what most people think it means. And I’m not sure a lot of the people selling it do either.

The name on the tin

The photographer I mentioned earlier also told me that early in his career he hired a car and a suit he couldn’t afford. He faked it until he could afford to actually be it. Which is honest, and I respect the hustle. But it does tell you something about what “luxury” can be built on.

A lot of what gets called luxury in wedding photography is really about status by association. It’s Veblen goods logic: the price is the product. The name is the product. The collection at the end is almost an afterthought –  a souvenir of having made the right booking.

Unreasonable hospitality

Here’s another version of luxury:

A couple of years ago I was photographing a wedding at a luxury hotel in London, and the couple kindly paid for me to stay there. It was genuinely eye-opening. The staff seemed to anticipate what you needed before you knew you needed it. There was a falconry display on arrival, welcome drinks, little moments designed to surprise and delight. And freshly ground coffee in the room  –  which, if I’m honest, I appreciated considerably more than the falconry.

What I was experiencing was the philosophy behind Will Guidara’s Unreasonable Hospitality – the idea that true luxury isn’t about the price tag or the postcode, it’s about making someone feel genuinely looked after. Anticipating needs the client doesn’t even know they have. (You may have come across this book the same way I did, in the Bear episode ‘Forks’ – if you know, you know)

That version of luxury I understand. And I think it’s something photographers can actually offer — not through fancy cars or a certain kind of Instagram grid, but through how you show up, how you communicate, how you make a couple feel on one of the most charged days of their life.

The rebellion, and where I actually sit

Some photographers are kicking against all of this and developing genuinely individual voices. Embracing rawness, direct flash, scrappiness, refusing the polished commercial surface. Which I respect enormously, even when I don’t personally love every result.

Rebellion in visual culture has a short half-life, though. Direct flash was provocative. Then it was cool. Then every wedding account on Instagram had it. The mainstream absorbs everything and we keep moving forwards like sharks, chasing the next best thing or, hopefully, finding our own unique voice that doesn’t rely on being ahead of the trend curve. 

So where does that leave the rest of us?

Which brings us back to where we started – the conversation about luxury in wedding photography is mostly a conversation about image rather than the images. About how a photographer looks to the outside world, what their clients can say about them, how the photos perform on social media.

And almost none of it is about what it’s actually like to look back at your photographs in ten years.

What I care about is that last part. I want to make photographs that take you back to the feeling of the day, the atmosphere, the people, the things that happened that you nearly forgot. Not photographs that perform well on a grid. Not a name you can drop at dinner. Just images that mean something to the people in them. I  see that as a luxury. To have someone who wants to do that for you.

I did, for what it’s worth, just take delivery of a Leica.