The Wedding Photographer

Every pro photographer, in the long duration of his or her salad days, shoots weddings. There is an intimate relation, in the culture of our age, between a wedding and its photographs, glossy memories captured and rendered by The Photographer and paid for as an intimate part of the Event, along with wedding gown, tux rental, rings, florals, cake and rental of the church hall.



Apparently it wasn’t much of a side-venture for Timm, since only one set of wedding pictures, shot in fall 2006, was in his digital archives. Perhaps he just didn’t keep the relics of those shoots, giving everything – digital images or negatives along with the prints – to the customer.



Timm included wedding photography as one of his specialties in proposals he sent out, and there is a wedding price list from 2007 for Timm O’Cobhthaigh Photography (“Hard to pronounce – Easy to work with!” is the motto) which includes a shot checklist for the customer to complete.



He also prepared the following notes for the wedding of a Jamie and Ken in 2006 – they may have been for this very series of images. The notes include:

Sally Cook is coordinator. Can be focussed, bossy, take charge. Timm will get together w.her the day of. Will have Timm’s # & will probably call ahead of time …

… Timm will be there by 1:00 pm, will scout area for nicely staged photos /easiest to do after wedding, before reception …

Guys dressing room behind altar area. WHERE is gal’s?

Can do alone shots ahead of wedding - - - w/fam, etc. She just doesn’t want groom to see bride beforehand. She would like both outdoor & indoor shots. She does want photos taken of parents being seated & she wants lots of cry shots.

Right outside sanctuary is a bunch of beautiful foliage. As guests head toward reception area, the sanctuary area will be devoid of people. So this would be a good time to do outdoor shots ..

… She’d like shots outside w/groom. That will be AFTER wedding ceremony. Pastor should make an announcement that B & G will be delayed. Since there will be no reception line, Jamie & Ken will work the tables.

Gals & guys separate shots inside. Guys before ceremony - - - possibly gals. Coordinator does know family members.

Would like black & white photos where flowers are in color - - - just a couple.

8 X 10 w/frame is $55 - - - She’d like a black & white w/color flowers that are framed. But she’s not sure. Ken wants Jamie & him, her w/parents, him w/parents, all family together & wedding party (bridesmaids/grooms [3 & 3 for party]). Dj for reception & a soloist during ceremony. Event will go till about 5:00 pm. They will leave later that night on honeymoon.

Will put photos on online service for about 3 months & then friends & family can order through them.

From these pictures, it’s evident that wedding photography is a craft like nature photography or sports photography; intimacy and beauty merge in the moment of the accomplished photo, the ten thousandth frame in the overall series, and Timm hadn’t gotten there yet. But he gave it his best shot.



Maybe Timm was unhappy enough with these first results, which aren’t bad at all, just somehow untransparent enough, off their mark just enough to show that the Photographer was present. The best wedding pictures seem to seamlessly marry participants with the myth, to bring out the heart which hopefully is there, no matter who is participating in the ritual.



Certainly a challenge for the Photographer. Critical to the job is getting all of the right moments; it’s like a Bond movie where all of the routine ingredients have to be summoned up anew and re-canted: ordering the vodka martini (shaken, not stirred), announcing, at some moment, the name – “Bond. James Bond” – and quipping off-handedly after dispatching some evildoer, as in “Thunderball” where a woman assassin is shot by mistake by her while the two were dancing. Bond deposits her in a chair at a table, explaining to the other sitting there, “Do you mind if she rests a moment? She’s just dead.”)




Every wedding repletes the myth of marriage, with each moment of the proceedings like stations of the Cross: preparing of the bride by the mother; her ushering to the altar by the father; the assembly of Groom and Bride’s maids and fellows up there; the ceremony with the exchange of rings and the reading of the vows; the happy recessional; the cutting of the cake and feeding to each other way too big a bite; the bride’s last dance with her father and first with her husband, etc.





Get the picture? We all should, because we’ve all been through it, or most of us, in one manner or other Of all of us Cohea kids, only Molly had a church wedding. Will had his in the Columcille chapel and grounds, Timm’s was in a gazebo in Canby, Oregon, my first was in the back yard of my aunt and uncle’s house and for my second wedding we eloped, getting the ceremony alone at Winter Park City Hall with a justice of the peace.



For all of those events, a Photographer was at work, capturing the moments; usually it was one of us, Will or me or Timm. Or we were helping out. But more on that later

Through that singular and mythic moment of marriage a great variety must pass. The materials are various and raw: people who normally don’t suit up, often in tuxedoes, find themselves sweating in their starched collars. I have no idea who the people are in these pictures but I’m going to guess they were somehow associated with The Rooms, as we call them in the recovery movement. The roughness of the past is quite evident in these pictures; these people look like they’ve harrowed through much harder nights in the past. The bride has a daughter, perhaps of a much worser union. The appearance of so many parents is surprising, that they are still alive, that those relations yet endure. Maybe I’m reading the pictures too closely, but there is a callousness to the faces of the particulars, as if they had been there before; a certain weathered look which makes the springtime hope of the moment itself have a bit of the sere cast. Once again the ceremony of a lifetime, the vows which were equally earnest at some earlier, fated moment.



Again, perhaps I read the pictures with too much of my own history crowing in the background. Timm and I share so much of the same narrative arc. We both had failed first marriages involving kids. I remember well Timm’s wedding day in October 1995, how he vowed to the assembly, “Divorce is not an option,” how bees got into his bride Mik’s wedding dress. Her father sitting in a front row of folding chairs with a stony visage. From this much later vantage, the fatedness of the moment is what is clearest, an irony of the hardest sort, since that marriage for Timm was a disaster, difficult from the start and taking years to grind to a greatly wounded end. Timm, I understand, would always suffer a swooning depression on the anniversary of that wedding day.



As I said, my first marriage was also difficult, perhaps fated for the same reasons. We both married women with complex, conflicted histories, we went for the same woman. We desperately wanted to become family men, if not having children ourselves marrying into existing families. Automatic dads; just add wedding rings. It seemed that simple, but we both found out what work was required, how scant our emotional resources – both of us just recently entered alcohol recovery – were. We both tried, O we tried, to grow a marriage in what proved an impossible field. The hope was real, the words of faith were real, the consequences are real. Timm’s divorce was very difficult; he had to change his last name to continue seeking work. While mine wasn’t so messy – it was quite amicable, after six years of suffering – it still casts a long shadow. My stepdaughter Angela is in her 30’s now, has two children which she has dragged through a morass of drugs and flight. I haven’t spoken with her in three or four years.




No matter how lucrative the gig, perhaps the stain of history made the role of Wedding Photographer too difficult for Timm, his own failures making it difficult to craft those images which assert such faith in the institution. Maybe he shot this wedding as much out of care for fellows in the program as the money he might have made. He did develop a wedding flyer, and there are shots of what appears to be a cover for a bridal feature (not a wedding he himself shot), and there are a few pictures of the bride and groom from another wedding, the groom being a guy Timm had greatly helped in recovery.




But that’s all. Given the volume of other commercial gigs on his laptop and external hard drives – dozens of shoots for The Oregon Garden and Mount Angel Publishing – the wedding photo part of his portfolio is almost nonexistent. Clearly it was work he begrudged, either because of his own troubled feelings about the institution (remember, Timm himself came from a broken marriage), or because it was another area of craft which he just hadn’t taken up with.



Turning to Timm’s nature images is like chucking the tuxedo and the wife for a free romp alone in the great womb of nature. All of the inside rapture of love, I believe, can be found in Timm’s flowers and cascading waterfalls, moments of infinite beauty and wonder. Much less problematic than the intricacies and complexities of dealing with a real Other, though that’s not to say that Timm’s nature pictures are somehow less accomplished. Perhaps Timm’s intimacies were too deep for marriage, and could only be fully expressed in the wide open spaces of a forest trail or seashore.



Perhaps. He seemed to be angling back to marriage; his relationship with Christie was heading, albeit slowly, toward the altar. I remember Christie and her mother at Timm’s viewing after his death. As Christie stood up by Timm, stroking his fine, short grey hair, her mother said between tears that this was not the moment she had been expecting, a death farewell instead of a wedding day.




I wonder who takes the pictures at The Photographer’s wedding, that anonymous yet central figure for modern marriage ceremonies become the central figure an yet more anonymous – read mythic – enactor, as Groom become the one who says Yes to the rest of his life with a Beloved, stepping out in faith on the very ground which had risen up to bite him so fatally in the foot all those years ago, as Eurydice, bride of Orpheus, stepped on an adder on their wedding day. The Photographer become another man stepping up to the biggest responsibility in a life: Timm was approaching that day, I believe, and had his heart not given out we might have all assembled once again around him, expressing our faith once again with all of the intent and hope of the faces of the people in the periphery of these photos.



Every wedding is an act of faith in the human need for union, for better or worse; fragile as a rose blossom, equally stemmed with dangerously sharp thorns and still bearing the fragrance of the first kiss, the first rush of hope of growing to fullness day after day for the rest of the life with an Other.

Well, that didn’t happen for Timm, but the grief expressed by Christie shows it sure should have come to pass. He’s gone now, Orpheus not Eurydice passed to the land of the shades, his fine baritone echoing in rooms I cannot hear, though I try, though I try. Time goes on without him, empty in that sense; yet he is so present today as I write.




I woke around 2:30 a.m. this morning with the fringes of a migraine belling in my head – perhaps that’s what woke me – with fragments of a dream still visible as the heart of them was disappearing down the drain. I was looking for pictures on this laptop to accompany the post I hadn’t written yet, the one whose heart is deeply in this post this morning.

In the dream I was looking for raw, hard-tackle images in Timm’s archives -- Iowa in the Depression (where my father grew up, lost in the thorny wilderness of his own parents’ marriage) or some place further south, in mom’s broken heart; someplace on those windy dry afternoons in Spokane, Washington, during those years of my greatest isolation; or something current, perhaps, worn-down vistas of the coming destitution; yet they had to be Timm’s images, from his world, something to place at the deep heart of this post about wedding photography. I wondered, in my dream, what folders I might find these pictures in, if there were wings of the archival library I hadn’t yet discovered, a folder in a folder in a folder with shots I hadn’t yet discovered containing a central truth about Timm that was yet undisclosed. Perhaps it was the earnestness of the search which woke me with such purpose that I had to get up, have my coffee, feed the cats and settle into this post right away.




Not that I found those images; not that they exist. Instead I have this batch of wedding pictures, pulled from a folder of about 100 images from a fall day in October 2006, a decade and more since Timm’s own wedding day. Just a gig, and not a very distinguished one; yet the heart of some matter is there, is here, as if Timm were much alive and at work, taking those pictures, coming to love, circling that altar even as he rounded further out into the wilderness singing his love songs to God.




I end with another Mary Oliver poem which to me captures Timm’s perplex faith in love, deeply receptive to its raptures while equally fearing its long nourishment, an engagement with equal capacity to succor and destroy. Here is our Photographer, our Timm, in his true element, capturing images of a wedding older than ours, between the world and its God. With that groundwork so accomplished, I believe he was truly ready to begin offering it up to an Other – once again, perhaps for all the rest of his time.

THE RAPTURE

Mary Oliver

All summer
I wandered the fields
that were thickening
every morning,

every rainfall,
with weeds and blossoms,
with the long loops
of the shimmering, and the extravagant-

pale as flames as they rose
and fell back,
replete and beautiful-
that was all there was-

and I too
once or twice, at least,
felt myself rising,
my boots

touching suddenly the tops of the weeds,
the blue and silky air-
listen,
passion did it,

called me forth,
addled me,
stripped me clean
then covered me with the cloth of happiness-

I think
there is no other prize,
only rapture the gleaming
rapture the illogical the weightless-

whether it be for the perfect shapeliness
of something you love-
like an old German song-
or of someone-

or the dark floss of the earth itself,
heavy and electric,
At the edge of sweet sanity open
such wild, blind wings.