Wedding photojournalism in Italy

Wedding photography. Report style is more trending

From today you can say goodbye to the long yawning of relatives in front of the classic wedding photo album. The old way of photographing a wedding, the one with the subjects in pose goes to the attic, replaced by a more dynamic and exciting style: the photo report.

The wedding album: the terror of relatives

Everyone, at least once in their lives, happened to visit newly married friends or relatives. After the first pleasantries, you are invited to sit on the sofa to browse the wedding photo album. Moment of panic …

After a first forced smile, you accept the invitation and we resign ourselves to spend a good half hour looking at the photos. Often it is an endless succession of images with subjects in poses seen a thousand times on other double photo albums. The yawning advances inexorable, unless you have to suffocate it to not show that you are getting bored.

The style has changed

Fortunately, today it is very fashionable to create wedding photographs in reportage style. This is what Girolamo Monteleone tells us, a wedding photographer from Rome specialized in wedding reporting.

“Today the newlyweds want to be photographed in freedom, without being forced to perform in clumsy forced poses. Maybe they do not even know what marriage reportage is but they can distinguish it when they look at the photos of my previous photo shoots. And they always ask that kind of photographs for their wedding “.

But what is reportage in photography?

The reportage is a journalistic jargon born to tell the events when they are happening. In the report everything is captured moment by moment; a priori, you never know how it will end.

Translating the concept of reportage in wedding photography, we obtain a photographic style that privileges the naturalness and spontaneity of the framed subjects. So nothing forced poses. The wedding photojournalist will be a discreet presence, careful to capture with his reflex the most significant moments, the most curious expressions and emotions experienced by the protagonists throughout the day.

In the reportage-style double photographic report, for the photographer there is only a soft canvas to follow: the bride and groom’s preparations, the ceremony, the walk, the celebrations in the chosen location. All the rest is to be careful to capture what in photography is famous as the “Bressonian moment“.

This term was coined to summarize what Henri Cartier Bresson explained about the photographic reportage: “recognizing a fact at the same moment in which it happens and, in a fraction of a second, rigorously organizing the visually perceived forms that express this fact and the they mean. “

If you look closely, every wedding is full of Bressonian moments and knowing how to capture means giving life to a wedding album full of beautiful, exciting and engaging images.

How to reconcile the need for souvenir photos with reportage

It could be objected that in a wedding it is necessary to take photographs of the subjects in pose: the spouses with the parents, the cutting of the cake, the toast, the overview of the guests.

All this is true, as it is also true that a photo pose posing does not escape even a photojournalist.

In this context, the substantial difference between a classic and a reportage style photo shoot is the number of photos taken while posing. A wedding photojournalist will reduce this number to a minimum because he will be able to propose the same type of photographs taken in order to capture the subjects in spontaneous and natural attitudes.

To give an example, the photo of the cut of the cake with the couple framed in a stiff pose and forced smile due to repetitiveness (after hundreds of photos posing is normal), will certainly cause less emotions of the same picture taken while laughing and joke infected from the joy of the moment.

To sum it all up, what a wedding photojournalist does during the course of her work, is to hunt for emotions, freeze them in the images and return them to life in the wedding album.

How to find a good wedding photojournalist in Rome

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