The pandemic forced this wedding photographer to refocus. What she found was a whole new perspective.

My job is to capture the perfect moments, the beautiful ones. To give people photographs that they will proudly be able to display on every form of social media. 

Credit: Shawn Lazo

I can confidently say after ten years of doing this job and seeing the stress a wedding can bring, I may be eloping on a mountain with a goat as our witness. I used to love the actual wedding part the most, the details, the perfect moments to capture…but now, for me, the best part of my job is telling the love story behind it. 

I’m not talking about the type of love stories they show us in the movies that end with fireworks and castles and a complete lack of reality. I’m talking about the girl who sat by her new boyfriend’s hospital bed for four months, after he got home from Afghanistan in a body cast with a missing eye. He was discharged on Christmas Eve. He proposed that night. Or the boy who told his brother that when he was on the plane that went down in the Hudson River, all he could think about was his newly ex-girlfriend. They got back together and are happily married with a child now. 

And the kind like my parents.

They had four children, worked their entire lives, and did everything they could for their family. And then, after 40 years of fighting as hard as they could for what they had together, my mother slipped away from him as he held her hand in a hospital room. All four of their children were there, watching them.

I’ve been photographing weddings for a decade now. And just as I was about to approach a huge milestone for my business, the world started to shut down. Weddings were being cancelled or postponed and I had barely any work. Suddenly, I felt like I had no perfect, beautiful moments to capture. 

And then I remembered a moment I had with one of my couples. It was a year prior. I was in Indiana with a bride and groom I hadn’t seen in eight years since photographing their wedding. They had offered to host me during a trip I was taking to all 50 states. During my stay, Margaret asked if I could recreate one of their wedding photos. It was a shot of their two dogs, in focus, and the bride and groom blurry in the background kissing. Only now those dogs had died, and they had two new ones and a six-year-old daughter. After we took the photo I stayed up and chatted with Margaret and told her how she was actually one of the reasons I had started this career. She had been so carefree on her wedding day, jumping in the back of an old dirty pickup truck with not a care in the world as she smiled at her new husband. They had seemed so in love. 

She looked at me smiling and said, “You know, we almost got divorced.”

That moment was imprinted in my mind for weeks afterwards. I kept thinking about how she opened up to me and revealed the struggles they faced in their marriage and what changed after they had their daughter. 

The thing is, the movies don’t often tell us what happens AFTER the wedding. After the “I do.” It shuts off as Cinderella is getting whisked away in a carriage by her man, or Swayze lifts his baby out of the corner and up into the sky in the most iconic dance move.

But then what? 

So, I decided to create something. 

Credit: Mary Latham

I reached out to 30 local couples I had photographed over the last decade, and we met back up at the location of their wedding day. I put them back in the same pose, or old car, or in front of the same barn…and snapped the same photograph. But now there were kids. Or puppies. 

Then I went into their homes to see what their life has been like since their wedding day. Most of them had just put their kids to bed. No hair. No make up. No knowledge in advance that I would be filming them.

Just raw, real, candid footage. It was so different from the wedding galleries I would normally deliver. 

I give people beautiful photos of beautiful moments because that is what I am getting paid to do. But what I didn’t realize it was doing was giving other people the wrong idea. They were looking at a perfect photo assuming the people were, in fact, perfect. Yes these were beautiful people, but they were far from perfect. They were scarred with challenging moments, and boiling over with stories. Marriage was hard. Raising children was hard. All of it was a job. And it wasn’t easy.

Sitting with all of these couples taught me that, but it also taught me something else. Perspective. 

I’ve been back in my hometown for the last few months wondering if something was wrong with me. Because everyone around me was in a marriage or had children. It starts to make you question yourself. You see image after image of an engagement or a wedding or a new baby on social media and you start to get jealous. 

Meanwhile, I learned, some of these couples were looking at me, wishing they could go on a trip or be able to travel for months at a time, or maybe move to Alaska.

Credit: Mary Latham

Social media has a way of manipulating us into jealousy when all we see is an image of what appears to be a perfect moment, but the reality is, each of us holds a story. Each of us has our own struggles. Maybe we need to change the way we see the image and realize that if we open our hearts to the ability to imagine what people might be going through, we will gain a little more perspective into our own lives and the things that we have been given. Maybe we will realize, we actually don’t have it so bad after all.

What’s the lesson here?

I hope this project unveils a bit of the social media facade that we fall victim to. I hope it helps people be more relatable than their perfect wedding photos. I hope it makes you feel less alone. Whether you’re in a marriage, or you’re single like me. We may never walk a mile in someone else’s shoes, but we can learn to be comfortable in our own.

Mary Latham has been a wedding photographer and storyteller since 2010. After her mother died, her entire life erupted. She left NYC, got a one-way ticket to the U.S. Virgin Islands, moved to Italy, and then spent three entire years driving to all 50 states in her mother's old car to make a book for hospitals. She is currently back in her hometown, Orient, NY, working on a recreation project for couples she photographed over the last decade.