Every wedding photographer has one special image that has defined their careers and Lisa set out to ask a selection of those who have most influenced her to nominate their stand out shots for her monthly column in Professional Photo Magazine.
IAN WELDON PICKS OUT THE ONE IMAGE THAT HE FEELS WAS HIS GAME CHANGER
There are photographers that just make the whole thing cool, like Janneke Storm who broke the internet with a wedding in Vegas and every bride who has worn sequins since or anyone who finds themselves holding a smoke bomb at a wedding has Janneke to thank. Nessa K was the first wedding photographer that I followed who really put their personality online. Suddenly we had a voice as well as a vision. I recently spent some time with Ian Weldon, and I think we will see his influence next. He’s tried, no really – he has – to tell everyone he meets that he’s not a wedding photographer. Initially, after a stint as a ‘moderately unsuccessful’ portrait studio photographer, he started shooting weddings as a way to make money to allow him to work on other documentary projects, but he soon realised that weddings could become an interesting project in themselves.
Over the next 9 years, Ian shot more than 150 weddings in the UK and abroad and his individual style has led him to being feted as the “coolest wedding photographer in the world,” even while he continues to protest that he’s not a wedding photographer at all. In 2019 he was rewarded with a solo exhibition at the Martin Parr Foundation in Bristol – a show that was, amazingly, the first exhibition of wedding photography in a fine art gallery in the UK. It coincided with the publication of a monograph entitled ‘I Am Not A Wedding Photographer‘,
Everything goes full circle, and with the phenomena of the social media lens, perfection and filters reaching breaking point for many, I predict a rise in popularity for Ian’s brand of wedding photography; an unbiased approach to the day, where emotion and door knobs and gestures and fancy lights and funny faces all get treated exactly the same. “Those things are yours on your day, and it all means something to you,” the foreword of I Am Not A Wedding Photographer details. “Things happen at a wedding, things that make your wedding yours, unique to you. If I came to your wedding with any idea about how it should be, should look or should not look, then that’s not your wedding, or at least it’s not how your wedding should be documented. Uniqueness doesn’t have a template, it doesn’t have a formula and it certainly can’t be pigeon holed.” In typical Ian Weldon fashion, he doesn’t claim to have a game changing photograph – but he did pick out this one for me. Let’s see what he had to say about it…
WHAT IAN SAID…
“I’d not claim that any photograph I’ve taken could be seen as a ‘game changer’, but this, from one of the first weddings I photographed stood out as something different. It made me realise that there was more to be explored at a wedding than the usual group shots, portraits, editorial style table settings and details.”