While Everyone is Still Here

There’s a good chance that everyone you love will never be in the same room together again.

I spend a lot of my life watching people, and after all these years photographing weddings, that thought crosses my mind more than it used to. You can have almost everyone who matters to you gathered in one place, perhaps for the only time in your life, and still forget just how extraordinary that is. I see people looking at their phones while someone they love is sitting only a few metres away. People thinking about what’s happening somewhere else while something far more important is happening right in front of them. Not because they don’t care, but because I think we’ve become so used to being connected to everything that sometimes we forget to connect with what’s actually around us.

We live as though there will always be another dinner, another conversation, another wedding, another Christmas. Another opportunity to sit beside that person, listen to the same story they’ve told you ten times and hear that familiar laugh again. But there won’t always be another one.

At every wedding I photograph, I find myself looking around the room and thinking about all the individual lives gathered inside it. Parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, childhood friends and people who may have travelled across the world just to be there. Every person in that room has their own life happening. Their own history, worries, memories, relationships and things nobody else in the room may know anything about. Yet somehow, for those few hours, all of those separate lives have crossed paths and everyone is there for the same reason. There’s something incredibly powerful about that.

Because life will move on from that room. People will get older, families will change and friendships will come and go. Some of the people sitting around those tables may never all be together in the same place again. And the hardest part is that nobody knows it at the time. Nobody tells us when a completely ordinary conversation will become one we’d give anything to have again. We don’t know which hug we should have held onto for another few seconds, or which familiar voice we should have listened to a little more closely.

We assume there will be another time because, until there isn’t, there always has been. And perhaps that’s one of the crueler parts of life. We often understand the true value of someone’s presence only after their absence. When they’re gone, we don’t necessarily miss the big occasions as much as we thought we would. We miss them simply being there. Their voice in the room. The way they laughed. The stories we’d heard a hundred times. The ordinary parts of them we barely noticed because we thought we had more time. And I imagine there’s a particular kind of regret in realising you were physically there for those moments, but your mind was somewhere else.

I certainly don’t get this right all the time either. I get distracted. I rush. I think about tomorrow when I should probably be paying more attention to today. That’s why I’m incredibly grateful for what this job continues to show me. I spend so much of my life watching people come together, and somewhere along the way it has made me look differently at my own life too. I get to witness the energy that exists when people genuinely connect. Families coming together, old friends picking up where they left off and generations of people sharing the same space for a few precious hours. There’s a warmth to that kind of togetherness that no photograph can ever completely explain. You have to be there to feel it.

After all these years, I think photographing these moments has taught me just as much about life as it has about photography. Simply having the people you love in the same room is something worth noticing while you still can. I’m still learning to be more present myself.

Maybe, by sharing some of what I’m lucky enough to witness, someone else might notice it a little sooner too.