I thought I’d drop an article about my influences – because most of them fall totally outside the sphere of wedding photography (though not totally – we will talk about that, too) They might help you understand why my work looks the way it does.

The thing I’m always trying to make – whether working a wedding, or with a family – is a photograph that puts you back in a moment. Not a record of what something looked like. The feeling of being there.

Migraine Photos

Ever since seeing an article about Alex Webb’s photos (in the Guardian, describing them as ‘migraine’ photos.) I have had an obsession with street photography.

I was just starting out, but I knew I didn’t want to be shooting lots of pictures of brides looking out of windows and reflections in puddles. I wanted to be making complex, multilayered imagery that put you in a time and place. That made you feel and think.  I’ve since come to realise that Alex Webb’s work is a lot closer to poetry than photography.

It was a bit of a pivot because my images of brides staring out the window and arriving romantically in classic cars had just placed me top 3 in The Guild of Photographer’s best wedding photographers in the UK… but it was not what I wanted to be making at all..

But what street photography actually gave me wasn’t an aesthetic to copy  – but it’s a way of working. Techniques for composing faster than your brain can think, because the moment is already disappearing. It’s there, it’s gone, and if you’re lucky it’s in the camera and it’s saying or even just invoking something. 

Two photographers I keep returning to are Trent Parke, whose black and white work is so abstract that people are often surprised to find out it’s street photography at all; and Gustavo Minas, who finds something usable  – often something extraordinary – in light, reflections and distortion that most photographers would walk straight past.

More recently I’ve been following Carmina Ripolles, who shoots around Hornsea with a warmth that makes you feel the relationship between her and her subjects. She’s also, somewhat flatteringly, said I can photograph her wedding if she ever has one.

Cinema

I’m a student of cinematography – photography’s moving twin. And it’s probably my love for cinematography that means I will never be a videographer. Some passions are best kept as influences.

I love the work of Roger Deakins, and his belief that cinematography should get out of the way. And Emmanuel Lubeski, who’s work on Children of Men, The Revenent and Gravity is some of the most immersive storytelling I’ve seen. The kind where you stop noticing you’re watching something and just start feeling it.

On TV Marshall Adam’s work on Better Call Saul and Colin Watkinson’s work on The Handmaid’s Tale are similarly breathtaking.

The lesson I take from all of them: the craft should be invisible. If someone’s looking at your technique, you’ve already lost them.

Photojournalism

I’m envious of photojournalists who get to embed. Sebastião Salgado and Josef Koudelka both work in black and white and couldn’t be more different in approach, but what their work shares is a quality that only comes from sustained time with a subject — a depth of trust that you can actually see in the photographs. A wedding is one day. I can’t replicate that. But I can bring the idea with me that I can, on a smaller scale, embed, understand and emphasise.

(If you’ve ever seen Salgado’s Genesis, you’ll see that it is a salve to having had to empathise for too long. It’s an absolute love letter to the planet we live on)

Radiohead

Radiohead are my constant. What they do – and have always done – is address emotions that don’t have obvious names. The uneasy ones. The ones that sit between categories. They’re not afraid to experiment, to fail, to do the exact opposite of what the industry wants. As artists, that integrity matters to me as much as the music itself.

That’s also the reason they end up on the soundtrack to everything. I need this particular emotion – and there’s a Radiohead passage that captures it.

Wedding Photography

The people whose work I actually love – Naomi Goggin, John Dolan, Joel & Justyna, The Mateers, York Place Studios, Lyndsay Goddard – don’t look anything like each other. That’s precisely why I love them. They’re distinct voices, not variations on a template.

I wouldn’t describe my own work as fitting cleanly into documentary either. But I do think of documentary as a way of working – a commitment to not manufacturing moments – rather than an aesthetic. And in the same way Trent Parke doesn’t look like street photography, sometimes my photos don’t look like wedding photographs. 

Why am I telling you all this?

At the end of the day it’s really hard to point at any one of these and say, this is why my work looks the way it does. I’m never going to be a photographer who’s after clinical perfection. I’m always going to be drawn toward work that’s impressionistic, a bit uncomfortable, and emotionally true. Photography that puts you back inside a feeling rather than just showing you what it looked like.