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
For six years I photographed restaurant kitchens for a food magazine. It is loud, cramped, badly lit work where nobody has time to pose and nothing can be repeated, and it turned out to be the best possible training for a wedding.
A friend asked me to shoot hers in 2014 because the photographer had cancelled. I said yes on the condition that she did not expect anything staged. She still has the picture of her father sitting down halfway through his speech, and so do I.
Two hundred-odd weddings later the approach has not really changed. I turn up early, I learn everyone’s names, and then I try very hard to become furniture.
I take a limited number of weddings a year so that each one gets the whole week around it — the planning calls, the day itself, and the editing while it is still fresh.
How the day goes
Three parts, and none of them are stressful
Morning
I arrive while everyone is still getting ready. Dresses, letters, your mother doing your hair badly on purpose. Nothing is set up.
The ceremony
Quiet lenses, no flash, and I stay out of the aisle. What I am watching is not you — it is the front row watching you.
Afterwards
Twenty minutes of portraits somewhere with good light, then back to your own party. I stay through the first dances.
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
214
Weddings photographed
11
Countries
18
Weddings a year, no more
Work has appeared in
