What a wedding photographer does when there are no weddings
COVID-19 and the subsequent quarantine has left a lot of couples scrambling to reschedule their weddings. A few have decided to have a very small ceremony right away with a larger get together later. But many have simply postponed until they feel certain they’ll be able to celebrate with friends and family.
Wedding (and event) photographers, like myself, look at our calendars and see open dates from now until we don’t know when.
So, I decided to create my own assignment. Take porch portraits (lots of photographers are doing this) of Pine Lakers showing off something that has been helping them survive quarantine. I’ve been especially interested in photographing artists and musicians with their instruments, art work, journals, sculptures or paint brushes.
In addition, I’m asking each person to write a little something about what’s keeping them going while they’re hibernating.
Here’s a portrait of Amy Pence and a poem she has written about quarantine.
Amy Pence, Tree Side of the Lake
Ways to Stay Inside the Inside
by Amy Pence
[A softness, as if from everywhere, is touching the earth – Rilke]
Preempt your regular programming to go bullseye into the universe.
Love the muddled memories of your created earth.
By midnight, develop a routine--
--quickly dispense.
Travel down rabbit holes, but burrow lightly.
Enact two dozen varieties of flora—one that billows from your palm.
Make furious love to your shadow. Over a threshold, imagine a constellated real.
Piece together the rough details that cradled your birth.
Watch your fear, but protect the young in their thriving.
Experience one ecstasy a day:
- the split apple’s tart future
- the velvet anemones turned to sun
- the masked fisherman
as he lets the fish go.
Make allowances for the composition of bread and other transcendent materials.
Forget the hands that may have disfigured you & remember the ones that
drew you to beauty.
If don’ts once hindered you, turn them into a softness.
Contemplate the highest ceiling—all the star charts—reconstructed from our rough
anatomies.
Initiate a different touch. Keep going --