There are moments at every wedding I photograph that are so pure and in the moment they’re impossible to replicate. A glance between two people, knowing that they don’t need words to express their love for one another. A laugh that just explodes out and engulfs everyone near it. An extra tight squeeze of the hand that let’s the other person know “I’m here. I’m always here.” The moments are natural and emotional and totally unfabricated.
I could not have planned that moment. No amount of asking would bring it into existence like that. There was no way I could have directed it into existence.
These moments are why I photograph weddings the way I do.
What “Documentary” Actually Means
The word gets used loosely enough in the wedding industry that it’s worth being precise about what I mean.
Documentary wedding photography means I am an observer first. My job on your wedding day is to watch, anticipate, and respond — not to construct, arrange, or direct. I’m not setting up scenes. I’m finding them.
This is not the same as being passive. Documentary photography is intensely active work. It means being in constant motion, reading the room, knowing when to get close and when to pull back, anticipating where an emotional moment is likely to happen before it does. It means being unobtrusive enough that people forget I’m there — because people who have forgotten the camera is present behave like themselves.
What it doesn’t mean is telling you where to stand, how to hold each other, where to look, or what expression to make. It doesn’t mean pausing the natural flow of your day to construct images of what the day is supposed to look like.
There are photographers who work that way, and they produce beautiful, polished images. This is not a criticism of that approach. It’s an explanation of why it isn’t mine.
The Problem With Direction
When you direct someone, you get a version of them responding to direction.
That sounds obvious when you say it plainly. But I don’t think couples always realize that’s what they’re signing up for when they hire a photographer who heavily directs. The images look beautiful in the portfolio — because they were created by someone with a strong visual sense, selecting for their best results. What you can’t see in the portfolio is everything that was left out: the in-between moments, the private glances, the laughter that broke out because something went slightly wrong, the quiet exhale after the vows.
Directed photography creates images of a performance. Not a false performance — you genuinely love each other, you genuinely mean what you said — but a performance nonetheless. You are aware of the camera. You are responding to instruction. Your body is where someone told it to be.
The most common thing couples say when they look back at their wedding photos is some version of this: the posed ones are nice, but the candids are the ones we keep coming back to.
I’ve heard this so many times, from so many couples, over so many years, that I stopped treating it as a preference and started treating it as information. The images that endure are the ones that captured something true. The images that feel thin after a few years are the ones where you can see the effort — the awareness of the camera, the arranged hands, the manufactured moment.
What Happens When You Stop Directing
Something interesting occurs when a photographer stops trying to control a wedding day and starts trusting it instead.
People relax. Not immediately — there’s almost always an adjustment period, especially during portrait time, when couples are most aware of being photographed and most unsure what to do with themselves. But within a few minutes of walking together, talking, just being somewhere with each other, the self-consciousness starts to fall away. And when it does, what emerges is so much more interesting than anything I could have asked for.
I’ve photographed couples who told me in advance that they were terrible in front of a camera — that they always looked stiff and awkward and hated every photo ever taken of them. And then I photographed their wedding, and within the first hour something loosened, and by the end of the day I had frames of them that looked nothing like people who were uncomfortable in front of a camera. They looked like themselves.
That transformation doesn’t happen through direction. It happens through trust and through time — through the experience of a photographer who is clearly not trying to perform their job at you, but rather alongside you.
On Imperfection
I want to say something about imperfection, because it’s central to why documentary photography works and why the resistance to it often comes from the same place.
When couples look at heavily styled wedding photography — the editorial images, the perfectly composed portraits, the symmetrical arrangements — there’s a real appeal to it. It looks like the wedding you imagined. Clean and beautiful and controlled.
But a wedding isn’t any of those things, and trying to photograph it as though it is produces a document that doesn’t quite tell the truth.
Real weddings are someone’s grandmother laughing so hard she has to grab the arm of the person next to her. They’re the groom turning away during the vows because he’s trying not to cry and failing anyway. They’re a flower girl who has completely abandoned her assignment and is doing something inexplicable in the corner. They’re a look between two friends across the room that contains twenty years of history.
None of these moments are perfect. However, all of them are true, and the photographs that capture them will be looked at, years from now, with a quality of feeling that a beautifully composed portrait simply cannot produce — because they contain something that the portrait doesn’t. They contain what actually happened.
I embrace imperfection not because I don’t care about craft — I care about it deeply — but because I’ve learned that imperfection is where authenticity lives. A slightly imperfect frame with a real expression will outlast a technically perfect frame with a manufactured one, every time.
What I Do Instead of Directing
This is a fair question, and I want to answer it honestly because “I don’t direct” can sound like “I don’t do anything.”
What I do is create conditions.
For portrait time, we will get to our location and I’ll say something like: I want you to think about the first time you met or I want you to tell each other something that you’re very proud of the other about — why? Because it gets you engaged with one another instead of thinking about the camera. Because THAT is what your wedding day is about!
And then I’ll move around quietly and watch. I’m not directing — but I’m also not standing still with my camera at eye level waiting for something to happen. I’m working. I’m finding angles. I’m watching their faces. I’m waiting for the moment when they stop thinking about me and start thinking about each other.
That transition — that moment when awareness of the camera drops — is the moment I’m always waiting for. It usually comes. And when it does, what I capture looks nothing like a posed photograph, because it isn’t one.
During the rest of the day, my job is to be invisible enough that people stop performing for me, but present enough that I never miss what happens when they do. This means moving constantly, staying ahead of the schedule, knowing the venue well enough to always be in the right place before the moment arrives. It means resisting the impulse to intervene even when a shot might be “better” if I did — because intervention changes the nature of what’s being photographed.
There’s a discipline to not directing that is harder, in some ways, than directing would be. You can’t control for outcomes. You have to trust the day.
In more than 25 years of photographing weddings, I’ve learned to trust the day and my ability to capture what unfolds.
Who This Is Right For
I’ll be honest about this, because not every couple should hire a documentary photographer.
If you have a very specific visual vision — a particular editorial aesthetic, a set of images you’ve saved on Pinterest that you want to recreate, a strong preference for highly styled portraiture — then a documentary approach may not be the right fit. You want someone who takes the time to ‘produce’ the style you are going for, because those ‘perfect’ staged images take time. True story, I once had a bridesmaid say “We should do an Annie Liebowitz style portrait of the whole wedding party!” when we had an extra five minutes at the end of formals. Trust me, Annie, and the wedding photographers who do photos in a similar style, do not just whip up that lighting and styling in five minutes. There are photographers who excel at producing that sort of work, and you should hire one of them if that’s the style you want.
If you are deeply uncomfortable in front of a camera and you feel the only way you can get through portrait time is through detailed direction that tells you exactly what to do with every part of your body — I’m probably not your photographer. I will guide you through the process, telling you when to lift your arm slightly or turn just a smidge to your right, but I’m not going to treat you like a mannequin. Furthermore, I’d rather tell you that upfront than have you spend your wedding day waiting for instructions that aren’t coming.
But if what you want is a record of what your wedding actually felt like — the real emotions, connections, and moments that couldn’t have been scripted because no one would have thought to script them — then documentary photography offers something that no amount of direction can produce.
I’ve been doing this for more than twenty years. The images I’m most proud of are not the ones where I set something up beautifully. They’re the ones where I was in the right place at the right moment, with my eyes open, and something true happened in front of my camera.
Those images don’t come from telling people what to do. They come from watching closely enough that when the real thing happens, I’m already there.
Casey Fatchett photographs weddings in New York City, New Jersey, and the Hudson Valley. If Casey’s approach sounds like what you’re looking for, start a conversation here.
