Every group list I am sent starts at six and arrives at twenty-two. It grows in the last fortnight, usually by email, usually after somebody’s mother has seen a friend’s wedding album.
Here is the arithmetic nobody does. A group photograph takes three to four minutes once you include finding the people, which is the part that takes the time. Twenty-two groups is well over an hour, standing on grass, during the only part of the day when all your guests are in one place with a drink.
Eight is the number
Eight groups is about twenty-five minutes and covers everything anyone will actually want in ten years. A sensible eight looks like this:
- Both families together
- Your family
- Their family
- Your parents with you
- Their parents with you
- Grandparents with you
- The wedding party
- Everyone — one big one, taken from something high up
How to make it painless
Give one person who is not you the list and the authority to shout. A brother, an usher, anyone loud who knows the names. I do not know who your aunt is; they do.
Do them immediately after the ceremony while everybody is still standing where you left them. The longer the gap, the further into the garden your uncle has wandered.
The groups you skip are not lost. I will photograph those people all day; they just will not be lined up.
What I am doing the rest of the time
The photographs people frame are almost never the lined-up ones. They are your father at the back of the room during the speeches, or your friend crying at the ceremony and pretending not to. Twenty-five minutes of groups buys the whole rest of the day for those.
