Brit & Sheldon | Belair Pavilion Wedding, Paarl

I’ve been telling couples the same thing for years: at some point during your wedding, stop. Actually stop, step away if you need to, find each other and look.

Look at all these people. Look at this ridiculous, beautiful thing you somehow pulled off. Look at what you made together. And look at you.

I didn’t come up with that. At our own wedding, my husband took me aside for a moment and told me to really look — at the people, the day, everything around us. He said we should take it in. We should be proud of ourselves, and proud of us. I’ve carried that moment into weddings ever since.

Brit and Sheldon were married at Belair Pavilion in Paarl, and their wedding reminded me why. I hadn’t photographed them before and, before the wedding, I had only met Brit online. But from quite early in the day there was something wonderfully unapologetic about the two of them. They were all about each other. More like: look at us. This is our wedding. We did this. How fucking great is this?

And somewhere during the day I found myself thinking: I hope they keep doing this. Not weddings, obviously. One is quite enough. I mean the looking.

Years from now, when there’s work and family and babies or no babies and houses and bills and ordinary Tuesdays and whatever else life throws at them, I hope they still occasionally stop and say: Look at this. Look what we did. Look at us.

Wedding photography has a funny veneer of perfection around it. We photograph beautiful clothes and flowers and tables and sunsets and people looking their best. I love photographing all of that, but spend enough years photographing weddings and you realise the gold is somewhere else entirely. It’s in who notices. Who reaches for someone. Who quietly steps in. Who makes somebody laugh. Who has whose back.

Their wedding happened to fall on a personally difficult day for me. They couldn’t have known that, and I was there doing the job I love, but at a couple of moments their people noticed that the person behind the cameras could use a little kindness. Without fuss or questions, they gave it. A word here, a bit of humour there, someone quietly having my back when I needed it.

They probably don’t know how much that meant to me. But it also told me something about the people I’d been photographing all day. This wasn’t just wedding-day affection. This was the real stuff — the ride-or-die, got-your-back, fucking-love-you stuff.

And I think that’s why, after all these years, I still can’t quite let weddings go.

Brit and Sheldon’s Belair Pavilion wedding gave me all the things I love to photograph — the ceremony, the gardens, the changing Cape Winelands light, portraits around the grounds, family, friends, speeches and a very well-used dance floor. But what stayed with me happened underneath all of that: two people standing in the middle of something they had made together, completely aware that it was theirs.

So Brit & Sheldon — keep looking. At the big things, certainly, but especially at the ordinary ones.

Look what we did. Look what we made. Look at us.

xoxo

Rue