There’s a photo from a wedding I shot several years ago that I think about more than almost any other image in twenty-plus years of this work.
It’s not a technically great photograph. The exposure is slightly hot on one side. There’s a guest’s elbow intruding into the left edge of the frame. The subject — the mother of the bride — has her eyes half-closed, her face caught in that in-between state that portrait photographers spend their careers trying to avoid.
But she’s also gripping her daughter’s hands with both of hers, and she’s saying something, and whatever she’s saying has completely undone the bride, who is laughing and crying at the same time in a way that makes the distinction meaningless. And you can see, in the mother’s face, twenty-some years of love compressed into a single unguarded moment.
That photo has made people cry. Not in spite of its imperfections. Because of the truth those imperfections allowed in.
The Perfect Photo Problem
Wedding photography, as an industry, has developed a fairly consistent idea of what a great wedding photo looks like. Sharp focus on the eyes. Clean, even light. A composed, flattering expression. Everyone positioned deliberately. Everything controlled.
These images are genuinely beautiful. I don’t dismiss them. But over two decades of photographing weddings — and more importantly, over two decades of watching couples look back at their photos months and years later — I’ve noticed something consistent.
The technically perfect images get admired. The imperfect ones get felt.
There’s a difference between a photograph you appreciate and a photograph you return to. The ones people return to — the ones that get printed and framed, the ones they show to people who weren’t there, the ones that make them stop scrolling and just sit for a moment — are almost never the most polished images in the gallery. They’re the ones where something real broke through.
What We Mean by Imperfect
It’s worth being specific, because “imperfect” covers a lot of ground.
There’s technical imperfection: a slightly soft focus, an angle that isn’t strictly flattering, a background that isn’t perfectly clean, a moment caught a fraction of a second before or after the peak of action.
There’s compositional imperfection: an unexpected element in the frame, a crop that isn’t textbook, a photo that breaks the rules of portraiture because following the rules would have meant missing what was happening.
And there’s emotional imperfection: the mid-laugh face, the ugly cry, the expression of someone who is completely overwhelmed by feeling and not trying to look good for the camera — because they’ve forgotten, for a moment, that there is a camera.
It’s that third category that interests me most, and that produces the most lasting images. Because what looks “imperfect” by the standards of controlled portraiture is almost always just an expression that is too honest, too raw, too present to be composed.
Nobody cries beautifully. Nobody laughs perfectly. And the photographs that capture those moments without sanitizing them are the ones that remain true to what actually happened.
The Face You Make When You Forget the Camera
I’ve been photographing weddings long enough to know what happens to a person’s face when they forget I’m there.
It doesn’t always look like what we’ve been trained to want from photographs. The chin isn’t angled correctly. The eyes might be wet. There might be something happening with the mouth that wouldn’t make the highlight reel of anyone’s best angles. By the standards of a controlled portrait session, it might not be a flattering frame.
But it’s real. And real — fully, undefensively real — is so much rarer and more valuable than flattering.
I think about this especially during ceremonies, when people are standing at an altar in front of everyone they love, saying the most significant things they’ve ever said to another person, and the feelings become larger than their ability to manage them. Those moments don’t produce composed expressions. They produce faces in the middle of being changed by something.
Those are the photographs that will matter in thirty years. Not because they’re beautiful by conventional standards — though often, with the right light, they are — but because they contain proof. Proof that it was real. Proof that it mattered. Proof that this person was, at this specific moment, completely present in their own life.
The Photographs You Didn’t Know You’d Want
One of the things I’ve learned from showing couples their galleries over twenty years is that the images they respond to most strongly are often ones they didn’t know to hope for.
They knew they wanted a beautiful portrait at sunset. They knew they wanted the first kiss, the first dance, the cutting of the cake. These are the obvious photographs, and they matter, and I take them seriously.
But they didn’t know they wanted the photo of the groom sitting alone in a hallway five minutes before the ceremony, looking at the floor with an expression that contains everything — the magnitude of the day, the weight of what’s coming, the particular loneliness of a moment before something changes forever. That’s not a moment anyone asks for. It’s a moment that exists whether or not a photographer is paying attention.
They didn’t know they wanted the photo of the two friends who haven’t seen each other in years, recognizing each other across the cocktail hour and closing the distance. They didn’t know they wanted the flower girl who abandoned her basket and is now doing something involving a napkin that makes no sense at all. They didn’t know they wanted the groom’s father watching his son dance, and the expression on his face that took twenty years to accumulate.
These photographs couldn’t have been requested. They couldn’t have been directed. They happened because the day was allowed to be what it actually was, and the camera was in the right place to see it.
Why We Fear the Imperfect Image
I understand the anxiety that drives couples toward wanting controlled, polished photography. We live in a culture that has trained us to curate our own images relentlessly — to select for flattering, to filter out unflattering, to present a version of ourselves that has been reviewed and approved before anyone else sees it.
Wedding photography, approached that way, becomes an extension of that curation. You hire a photographer who will make everything look beautiful, in the specific way that beauty has been defined by ten years of Instagram wedding content. The images will look like the images you’ve always seen. They will be shareable and admirable and correct.
And they will tell a partial truth, at best.
Because the version of yourself you curate for public consumption is not the version of yourself at the altar. The version of yourself who has approved every photo before it goes out is not the version of yourself in the middle of the most emotionally overwhelming day of your life. The filtered self and the real self are different people, and only one of them was at your wedding.
What I offer, and what documentary photography in general offers, is a record that doesn’t ask you to be the curated version. It asks the real version to show up — which it will, inevitably, whether you plan for it or not — and it treats the result as something worth capturing.
The Long View
Here’s a thing that’s true about photographs, which becomes more true as the years pass: what you want from them changes.
In the weeks after the wedding, you might want the beautiful portraits — the images that look like the event you planned, the images you’ll share with the people who couldn’t be there, the images that say: look how wonderful it was.
Five years later, you’ll find yourself going back to different images.
Ten years later, you’ll know exactly which ones are the real ones.
And twenty years later — when the people in those photographs are different people, when some of them may not be there anymore, when the day itself has become something you can only access through the images — the photographs you will reach for are the ones that captured something true. Not the most composed ones. The most honest ones.
The slightly imperfect exposure that caught your mother exactly as she was. The frame where you’re not looking at the camera because something just made you laugh and you turned away. The image of your grandmother watching you dance, her face doing something that has no name but that you will recognize instantly and love completely.
Those images are not despite their imperfections. They are what they are because the imperfections let something through.
A Different Standard
I’d like to offer a different way of evaluating a wedding photograph than the one the industry usually applies.
Not: is this technically correct? Not: does this look flattering? Not: is this the kind of image I’d post?
But: does this contain something true? Does this tell me something about what actually happened, what was actually felt, who these people actually were on this day?
By that standard, the imperfect images almost always win.
After more than twenty years of this work, the photographs I’m proudest of are not the ones I set up. They’re the ones I was paying close enough attention to find. They’re imperfect, often. They’re real, always.
And real is the only thing that lasts.
Casey Fatchett photographs weddings in New York City, New Jersey, and the Hudson Valley. If you want a wedding record that tells the truth about your day — all of it — the conversation starts here.
