Photojournalism?
I have many bride's who contact us about creating images for their wedding and consistently they state that they are looking for a "photojournalist" approach to the wedding. Each time I need to ask questions to be sure that photojournalism is really what they are looking for. In its broadest context it means storytelling through photographs but to serious photojournalist they see it as documenting through photographs that are basically strait out of the camera and no image manipulation.
I personally feel that wedding images are both storytelling and art. Storytelling because afterall this is a story of your wedding but it should be art too. I believe that wedding are a place where we show our ideals. We might not always be this way (I know that I don't wear a tuxedo every day.) but it does show our aspirations. It is from this perspective that I try to make images that speak with feeling. On many occasions I need to strip out extraneous parts of an image so that it speaks with one voice about what is being said.
Here are some before and after images:
Neither of these images are posed so they do have the photojournalism structure but you can see the before and after images are so different. I believe that the final images should speak to anyone and communicate thoughtfully. In other words, images should be lingua franca.