Getting The Picture

Wedding photographers, needless to say, have never inspired such levels of envy. Instead, they reside in a category usually reserved for car salesmen and stamp enthusiasts, a little bit of Willy Loman with a pinch of Charlie Brown. Adam Sandler already made the movie about the wedding singer. Is there any doubt that the movie about the wedding photographer would star anyone but Albert Brooks? It's the reason that, even today, when the guy sitting next to me on the Delta Shuttle asks what kind of photography I do, I have a tendency to say, "Well, I worked for USA Today for 10 years, and now I have my own business." Move along; nothing to see here.

Then again, maybe I'm just missing something. In the past few years, a whole new breed of wedding photographers has emerged, particularly on the West Coast, determined to give the musty reputation a makeover. They share ideas on message boards ("Show us your cake pictures!!"), pat one another on the back ("You're a rock star of photography!!") and spend much of their time hawking seminars as if they're selling Herbalife products. They also conveniently sidestep the fact that shooting a wedding is a bit like taking an SAT in which you've been given all the answers in advance. I feel certain James Nachtwey, the legendary war photographer, would find life much easier if he knew where the bad guys were going to start shooting week in and week out.

This is why none of this was supposed to happen. Like all good young photojournalists, I was raised to mock wedding photography and all that it represented. I wanted to be a photojournalist, not some dork schmoozing up Aunt Alice. "I don't shoot weddings," the standard response of any self-respecting White House news photographer, was always more mantra than simple statement of fact. And in the late 1980s, when I was establishing myself here in Washington as a photographer, first at United Press International, with its constant going-out-of-business sales ("No, Pat Robertson was last week's buyer; this week it's the Saudis"), and then at USA Today, it was a badge of honor not to shoot weddings, and, by golly, I wasn't about to let the side down.

All of this was understood those many years ago. My photographic dreams lay in the desert, as in Kuwait, not in dessert, as in chocolate-covered strawberries. And I was well on my way to fulfilling them. I was five feet from Rodney King when he stammered, "Can't we all get along?"; 150 feet from President Bill Clinton as Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin shook hands; and 27,000 feet above Earth, lying on my belly in a flying gas tank, photographing one stealth fighter after another as they refueled en route to the Persian Gulf. I was shooting cool things and loving every minute of it.

By the mid-'90s, I had crawled around newly discovered tombs in Egypt, photographed huge celebrities in tiny hotel rooms and been splattered with blood -- curiously, something that is a badge of honor in photojournalistic circles -- while covering boxing title fights in Las Vegas. Everything seemed to be going according to plan, though as the years went by, little by little, I began to feel pangs of ambivalence.

Where you once asked a band for permission to photograph a concert, now you navigated a phalanx of lawyers. A one-on-one shoot with Jennifer Aniston in a hotel room had become a one-on-eight shoot, if I were to include all the publicists, with their little black dresses and walkie-talkies, breathing down my neck (and repeating the words "Three minutes, three minutes!" within the first 33 seconds). And, lastly, and perhaps most important, I began to grow tired of chasing people.

Chasing people is a staple of a news photographer's diet -- you can't claim conscientious objector status and elect to shoot the pet of the week instead. I spent a lot time chasing people (though "chase" is a misnomer because the actual act involves mostly walking backward, throwing elbows and focusing at the same time) at courthouses around the country: U.S. District Court (Marion Barry, Ollie North); the U.S. Supreme Court (pick an abortion case); Simi Valley (the LAPD/Rodney King trial); Los Angeles (O.J. Simpson); and, though she had no court to call her own, the chase of all chases, Monica Lewinsky.

For weeks and weeks in 1998, as that scandal broke, I chased Lewinsky for USA Today, with limited success, if one can even use that word. Though tame by Hollywood paparazzi standards, my Lewinsky chases became increasingly fraught with doubt and regret. Then, one Sunday morning, while walking with my wife and my dog in Georgetown, I found myself, sans camera, holding the door for Lewinsky at Starbucks on M Street -- like a hunter accidentally bumping into the stag he's been stalking for days. As she brushed by me, balancing a couple of lattes, she smiled and said, "Thanks so much!" and I said, "Soy-tinly!" -- for some odd reason playfully playing up my New York accent. And I thought to myself, What am I doing chasing this poor woman?

Perhaps it was coincidence, or maybe kismet, but the more the journalism ennui began to set in, the more it seemed people were asking me to shoot their weddings. Like a parent who is asked by his 9-year-old "Are we there yet?" 900 times, I couldn't seem to shake this damn question. And none of these people were looking for a dork in a tux: They wanted me to cover their weddings no differently than if I were covering a White House event or a rally on the Mall. With each wedding I photographed, I realized that there actually existed events in which people wanted you to take their pictures, where there was no yellow police tape and where the only lawyers present were the ones getting married.

And that's when I did it. There came a day several years back when, with reckless abandon, I decided to leave the noble pursuit of journalism, with its Page One budget meetings filled with smart people discussing Saddam Hussein or the latest North Korean standoff, not to mention the not-so-noble pursuit of, well, pursuits. I was ready to throw myself down a most unusual rabbit hole, reemerging into the bizarro world of Weddings, where family relationships can often be broken into the in-laws and the outlaws, where self-absorption can be raised to an art form, where a Jewish guy can recite the entire Catholic Mass by heart, as well as reel off, like an idiot savant, the date of every Saturday for the next year and a half.

"MATT, IT'S MISSY LANGERT, YOUR NEIGHBOR JOEL'S DAUGHTER, CALLING FROM DALLAS. Mom's had a massive heart attack while attending a wedding here, and Dad is home all alone. He didn't come out for the wedding. Is there any way you can go over and sit with him? He's all by himself."

Taken by surprise, I tried to process all of this information in a room filled with happy people having a wonderful time. She was at a wedding in Texas. I was at a wedding in Virginia. And Joel was all by himself.