Elopements & Intimate Weddings

Most couples arrive in Paris already knowing it. From a paperback read on a train, a film seen at nineteen, a postcard someone kept in a drawer for forty years. That Paris is real, but it's crowded. Everyone else brought theirs too.

There's so much reputation piled on top of Paris that the actual place can be hard to see. I go looking for the version that belongs to the two of you. It usually turns up early, on a side street, while the shutters are still closed and the city hasn't started performing yet.

An American, looking closely

I've spent most of my adult life as the foreigner in a beautiful place. I grew up outside Chicago, and I've lived in Oaxaca, Mexico, long enough that my wife and our three kids were all born there. Being the outsider turns out to be good training. You never quite stop noticing things: how a waiter sets down two cups, the light on limestone at the end of the day, a heart somebody scratched into the plaster next to a window.

Stay still long enough and the novelty wears off, and the real character of a place shows through. That's true of a city, and it's true of two people on the morning they get married.

In English, y en español

If half the family speaks Spanish and the other half English, or you're a Mexican or Latin American couple choosing Paris for yourselves, the day can happen in whichever language you actually think in. I've spent close to two decades photographing bicultural weddings in both.

"Although we were born in Mexico, we live in the US. Douglas had the best of both worlds. He is fluent in both English and Spanish, which allowed us to express as was natural to us."

Alejandra

How I work

Editorial when it counts, documentary the rest of the time. I'll find where the light is doing something and put you in it, and then mostly get out of the way. If you need a nudge, you'll get one. You won't get a list of poses.

My strongest influences come from independent film more than from other wedding photographers. So your highlight film has a shape to it, with a beginning and a quiet end, and nothing left in that doesn't need to be there.

One person, three cameras

A crew is the wrong idea for a Paris elopement. The streets are narrow, the cafés are small, and nothing ends a quiet moment on a bridge faster than a tripod and three assistants. I come alone and cover photography and video myself.

And I bring film: a medium-format camera and a 35mm. They aren't there so you can say you got some film photos. They change how I see. A roll of medium format gives me twelve frames, so I can't fire off thirty and sort it out later. I wait. For the waiter to step out of the frame, for the light to come around the corner, for the two of you to forget I'm there. The medium-format camera I look down into at waist height, with nothing held up to my face, and people stop noticing me a lot sooner.

Paris might be the most photographed city there is, and most of those pictures are taken fast, from the same spots, by people already walking to the next one. Slow down and it turns into a different place. The grain picks up the texture of old stone and café glass that a sensor smooths away, and the pictures come back looking the way the city felt.

A few practical things

The paperwork. A legal wedding in France requires a period of residency that most visitors don't have, so nearly every couple signs the papers at home and keeps Paris for the part they'll actually remember. That also means the ceremony can happen wherever you like: a quiet square, a garden bench, a bridge before the traffic starts.

The hour. Early. Until about eight the city belongs to delivery vans and street sweepers, and the light on the stone is at its softest. Evenings along the river work too, once the tour boats thin out.

The weather. An overcast Paris sky is one enormous softbox. Given the choice, I'll take it over a clear afternoon.

Half an hour west

Some couples want Paris for the morning and somewhere quieter for the rest of the day. Louveciennes is a village a short train ride west of the city, all stone walls and bare vines. At 2 bis rue de Montbuisson there's a green door where Anaïs Nin lived in the early thirties, and where Henry Miller kept finding reasons to visit. If you've read the diaries, or seen the film, you already know the house. If you haven't, it's still a good street to walk down together.