What Deadpan Photography Gave Wedding Photography

Why putting beautifully dressed people in remarkably ordinary places suddenly feels so right.

There is something slightly strange happening in wedding photography.

For decades, we were trained to look for the beautiful background. Move the couple away from the parked cars. Avoid the trash cans. Wait for the pedestrian to leave the frame. Find the clean wall. Find the sunset. Find something worthy of a wedding photograph.

And now?

We are putting brides in parking lots. Couples stand against construction fences. A perfectly tailored suit appears next to a pile of cardboard boxes. Someone in a couture dress is photographed under fluorescent lights, beside a fire extinguisher, outside a convenience store.

And somehow, it feels more contemporary than the perfect view.

Wedding photography obviously didn't invent this idea.

Photography has been making the ordinary interesting for a very long time.

When photographers stopped looking for the perfect landscape

In 1975, an exhibition at George Eastman House in Rochester quietly changed the way photographers looked at the world.

New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape brought together photographers including Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Stephen Shore, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal and others.

Instead of giving us heroic mountains and untouched wilderness, they photographed tract houses, industrial buildings, parking lots, suburban developments and roads.

Not exactly postcard material.

The shift was important. The landscape no longer needed to be spectacular to deserve a photograph. And the photographer didn't necessarily need to tell us how to feel about it.

The camera could simply look.

Straight on. Descriptive. Detached. Almost suspiciously unemotional.

Bernd and Hilla Becher pushed this even further with their systematic photographs of industrial structures. Later, photographers associated with the Düsseldorf School — including Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky — would continue exploring this cool, observational way of making pictures.

This is part of what eventually became associated with the deadpan aesthetic.

Deadpan photography isn't really about photographing ugly things. And it isn't just about asking people not to smile.

It's more interesting than that.

It's about refusing to make the subject perform beauty for the photograph.

And that idea has travelled surprisingly well.

Including, whether consciously or not, into wedding photography.

Wedding photography had its own version of the perfect landscape

Wedding photography spent a very long time doing exactly what those landscape photographers had started questioning.

It searched for perfection.

Beautiful couple. Beautiful light. Beautiful venue. Beautiful flowers. Beautiful background.

Then remove anything that interferes with that beauty. The result can obviously be incredible. There is nothing inherently wrong with a beautiful photograph of a beautiful place. But perfection has a problem.

Once everything in the frame agrees with everything else, there isn't always much left to discover. And in the endless stream of images we scroll through every day, perfection has become strangely easy to overlook and starts to look the same.

This may explain why some contemporary wedding photography has started moving in the opposite direction. Instead of removing ordinary life from the frame, photographers are increasingly allowing it back in.

The street stays messy.

The construction fence stays.

The air-conditioning unit stays.

The plastic chair stays.

The trash cans definitely stay.

And the bride stands right in the middle of it.

The ordinary background isn't really a background anymore

Consider a bride in a white dress standing almost completely front-on against a red brick wall in Chinatown.

There's a fire escape. A trash container. Pipes. Graffiti. Someone sitting behind her.

Traditionally, almost every one of those elements could be considered a distraction.

But remove them and the photograph loses its reason for existing.

The interesting part isn't simply that the location is imperfect. It's that the photograph doesn't apologize for it.

The camera steps back. The environment is sharp enough to matter. The subject is relatively static. The composition is descriptive. Nothing is being visually transformed into a romantic fantasy.

The bride and the street are given almost equal authority.

That's where the connection to deadpan photography becomes more interesting. Because deadpan isn't a location. A grocery store isn't deadpan. A parking lot isn't deadpan. A construction site isn't deadpan.

It's a way of looking at them.

Take the same couple outside a produce store in Chinatown. You could photograph them with a long lens, shoot wide open, hide the cardboard boxes, turn the vegetables into colorful bokeh and wait until nobody is walking behind them.

Or you could do almost the opposite.

Step back.

Keep the handwritten prices.

Keep the metal shutters.

Keep the cabbages.

Keep the pavement.

Let the couple simply exist inside all of it.

Suddenly, the ordinary environment isn't something we need to overcome.

It's the point.

Beautiful people, ordinary places

There is another thing happening here.

A wedding is already visually unusual.

People wear clothes they would almost never wear on an ordinary Tuesday. There are flowers everywhere. Carefully designed objects. Rituals. Formality. Emotion.

Place all of that inside an equally beautiful environment and everything agrees. But place it somewhere completely ordinary and something starts rubbing.

A white dress against road barriers.

A black suit and bridal bouquet beside dumpsters.

Formal wedding clothes outside a neighborhood produce store.

Neither element is particularly surprising on its own.

Together, they become interesting.

This is simply juxtaposition, one of photography's oldest tricks. Lensel recently gave a useful wedding-specific framing to the idea, calling it Tension Pairing: putting visual opposites into the same frame to create a kind of disagreement.

But the larger instinct is much older.

Deadpan photography helped teach us that the banal didn't need to be hidden.

Wedding photography discovered something else:

put something extraordinary inside that banality and both become more visible.

The dress looks more like a wedding dress next to a trash can.

The trash can somehow looks more like a trash can next to the dress.

That tension can be more visually satisfying than harmony.

So… isn't this just street photography?

Sometimes.

And that's where things get interesting.

Take another photograph made outside exactly the same produce store.

The couple is there, but an older man pushing a hand truck walks directly through the foreground. He's looking at his phone. The groom looks toward the bride. People are working inside the store. Everyone appears to be doing something independent of the photographer.

The location hasn't changed. But the nature of the photograph has.

Now the picture depends on something that actually happened.

The photographer is no longer primarily using the environment as a deliberately chosen visual counterpoint to the couple. He's reacting to several pieces of reality briefly arranging themselves inside the frame.

That's much closer to the language of street photography and documentary photography.

The distinction can be subtle because these approaches happily overlap.

A documentary wedding photographer observes what happens.

A street photographer often looks for coincidence, gesture, layering, timing and relationships between unrelated things.

A deadpan-influenced portrait can be completely constructed and still look observational.

The photographer can literally say:

"Stand there."

And then photograph the couple with the same visual neutrality normally associated with something found rather than created.

That's the paradox.

The moment can be directed while the photograph refuses to look overly directed.

Deadpan doesn't mean emotionless weddings

This is probably the biggest misunderstanding worth avoiding.

Nobody needs an entire wedding gallery of two people staring blankly into a camera beside dumpsters.

Please don't.

The influence of deadpan photography isn't about replacing emotion with indifference.

Wedding photography is still extraordinarily well suited to documentary photography precisely because weddings are unpredictable, emotional and full of human interaction.

The interesting possibility is letting these languages coexist.

One photograph can be intimate and documentary.

The next can be strange and frontal.

The next can be chaotic.

The next can simply describe two people standing somewhere completely unremarkable.

A wedding gallery doesn't need one visual grammar.

In fact, the contrast between those approaches may be what gives it rhythm.

Maybe we stopped needing everything to be beautiful

Maybe we've just had enough of Lake Como, the vintage Riva and the perfectly placed champagne tower. Perhaps that's the most useful thing deadpan photography gave wedding photography.

Permission.

Permission to photograph the unremarkable.

Permission to stop cleaning every frame.

Permission to let the environment be ugly, ordinary, confusing or simply real.

Permission to make a portrait somewhere without first asking whether that somewhere is beautiful enough.

Because a great location and a great photograph were never the same thing.

And sometimes the construction fence, the fluorescent light, the cardboard box or the person who absolutely refuses to leave your frame isn't ruining the wedding photograph.

Sometimes that's the reason the photograph works.