About
Elena Marsh
I photograph weddings the way I would want mine photographed: quietly, and mostly from the edge of the room.
How I ended up doing this
2012
Six years photographing restaurant kitchens for a food magazine. Loud, cramped, unrepeatable — the best possible training.
2014
A friend’s photographer cancelled three weeks out. I said yes on the condition that nothing would be staged.
2018
First wedding abroad, in Puglia, with forty guests and no plan for the heat. I have had a plan for the heat ever since.
2021
Moved to eighteen weddings a year and stopped taking more, so each one gets the whole week around it.
Now
Two hundred and fourteen weddings, eleven countries, and the same approach: turn up early, learn the names, become furniture.
214
Weddings photographed
11
Countries
18
Weddings a year, no more
Work has appeared in
We had said we did not want a photographer following us around. Then we did not notice her all day, and got back four hundred pictures of our own wedding.
Priya & Tom · Suffolk, June
Quickly, then
Coffee or tea
Coffee until eleven, then tea, then coffee again at four. It is not a system.
Camera
Two bodies, three primes. Nothing that needs explaining.
The dog
A lurcher called Bruno who is not allowed at weddings and knows it.
Furthest job
A farmhouse outside Rovinj. Fourteen hours door to door and I would go again tomorrow.
First dance song you hear most
"At Last". It has never once been a bad choice.
What I actually photograph
The parents. Every time. They are the ones who will want it in ten years.
Come and have a coffee first
No obligation and no slideshow. Half an hour, in person or on a call, to work out whether I am the right person for your day.