That’s right Ryan and I were both quoted in MacLean’s Magazine this week on page 60 of the March 17th 2008 issue, under the headline Are “engagerazzi” creepy or cool?
Yes that’s right MacLean’s Magazine made up a new word that describes, in the simplest terms, proposal photography. Basically the concept is a fairly new one and has yet to take the wedding/engagment scene by storm in Canada, it is photos that document a marriage proposal. The photographer will be approached by the person who wishes to pop the question to secretly document their proposal.
Ryan and I were approached by Cathy Gulli of MacLean’s to comment on the growing American photography trend, the purpose of the article was to take a Canadian spin on the concept and see what Canadian photographers thought of the idea, and whether or not it was an up and coming trend in our neck of the woods.
In the article proposal photography gets slammed by the opinions and negative words of some online bloggers, calling it creepy and narcissistic, a huge slam comes from William Saletan on slate.com that says “It’s another creepy thing that men do to women” and another slam came from a woman on jezebel.com “most women don’t want to be photographed without their permission, and they usually like to keep these life-altering moments to themselves.”
Now when I was reading this article out loud to Ryan at Wal-Mart the other night we were both a little stunned at the negative turn the article took. Proposal photography is a new idea and just like all new ideas there is going to be a backlash of haters and the opinions of people who have yet to experience this new idea. So to shed a positive light on proposal photography and hopefully drum up some willing, lovestruck, about to proposee’s, we thought we would share with you our complete opinion (that was not completely documented in the MacLean’s article) on proposal photography.
Ryan and I share the same views on photography, and on love, and we know that is why we have chosen to document love and people for a living. It is really something special about documenting a couple in love on their wedding day, it’s like watching a movie where you get to interact with the main characters as the story pans out. You see emotions come out of brides and grooms that they have been harboring their whole lives, emotions they have been waiting and dreaming to experience and share with their friends and families. That’s why we love shooting weddings, because we love to watch the huge anticipation of an entire lifetime of emotions come together.
But what wedding emotion lacks is that moment of pure surprise and instant overwhelming behavior that only comes with the biggest question one can ask another person that they love, “Will You Marry Me?” and then followed by shrieks and tears of happiness.
Why wouldn’t you want to relive that? It is pure and raw emotion, and it happens to couples everyday.
Ryan and I spend a lot of time looking at our massive collection of old family photographs and the ones we cherish the most are the ones of our grandparents and great grandparents caught in a moment, not the beautiful portraits. We love these images more because they tell us something about the people in the photos, they give us a window into the personalities of the people never knew or never had the chance to experience our grown up lives with. It’s really unfortunate that photography in the past wasn’t always capable of capturing split second moments, or sequences of photos, or that journalistic photography trends were non-existent when it came to photographing weddings or life’s special events. We believe that the reason why people have this dying urge to document every moment of their lives in an emotional and natural way is simply because they now can. We believe that people want to leave their mark on this world and within their families, we, just like many others want our future children and their future families to have that emotional connection with the past through photographs that show who we really are.
Proposal photography to us, is just as important as any other style of photography. It is one of life’s stepping stones, and I know that I would personally give anything to see photos from the moment my grandparents decided that they would spend the rest of their lives together. Documenting life’s moments not only our job, but also our passion, and having another creative outlet like proposal photography to document the lives of people in love is just the icing on the cake for us.
We want to thank Cathy Gulli for asking us to be apart of her article, if you wish to read the entire article, you need to pick up a copy of MacLean’s Magazine this week.
We hope that this post has shone some positive light on a really cool, new photography trend, and we hope that anyone interested in capturing this special moment will give us a call.
& Ryan