Apollo Fields 2021: 54 Weddings and 1 Baby
For the most part, our job as wedding photographers is to blend in, not stand out.
To move throughout the day like inconspicuous flies on the wall, floating through rooms and in and out of moments like a steady breeze through an open window. We take great pride in being given the opportunity to navigate the intimate spaces of wedding days, playing off the principle that stepping on a truly genuine moment is a cardinal sin. Year-in-and-year-out we flutter from venue-to-venue, unpacking and repacking our camera bags as quickly and commonly as the shutter clicks on our cameras. I am writing this blog to give a glimpse of what it is like to document a commencement of love 50 times a year in the span of six or seven months. It is with great love and appreciation that I say—it is our time to stand out.
From Brandon and Lia’s Wedding in September 2021 in Little Compton, Rhode Island.
2021 Still Wasn’t “Normal.”
We try to avoid using the word normal because it’s one of those “non-words” that doesn’t really mean anything. What exactly does it mean for a person or a year to be “normal”? As it pertains to people: the quirkier the better; but as it goes for wedding seasons, we’ll take predictable. Like the idea of a wedding happening on a specified date and location. Of course we have empathized with every couple for the last two years but can you imagine what our Google calendar has looked like? Think Charlie Kelly in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia vibes. Now picture him in a wedding dress.
And yet, it was the best year of my life.
I like to joke that having a kid feels like you’re playing the game of life on hard mode. Every activity of everyday or every trip is just that much harder. Mornings feel earlier and nights feel longer, but in between extended bouts of exhaustion there are pristine moments of overtired bliss. Like the walk Heather and I took at midnight in Montauk after a wedding as we watched the crests of waves hover and crash on the coast over and over again in the bright moonlight. Or when I held Capa just above the surface of the rooftop pool in West Palm Beach, pushing him through the water like the dorsal fin of a dolphin swimming in the Caribbean. For everything that being a parent takes away from you it gives it back in moments of overwhelming joy.
And also the busiest.
Between our 54 weddings in 13 states plus an unspecified amount of family and engagement sessions we changed diapers, spoon-fed, walked, drove, and nursed our baby Capa. The crazy part is that despite all of the time Heather and I spent together we often felt like we never saw each other. We developed a workflow where I would take Capa in the morning and let Heather catch up on sleep after nursing him all night. Then we’d have breakfast together and one of us would take him for the next stretch while the other person works. It was like a game of hot potato if that potato was adorable and could poop and pee. And despite developing the habit popular to babies of rubbing my eyes when I’m tired, I have no regrets about how we handled everything.
Ron and Sunil’s wedding in August 2021 at The Battery on the southern tip of Manhattan.
a reminder to Change over time.
I was just talking to Heather this morning about how I can’t imagine both of us still bartending full-time like we did in our twenties. It’s not that we couldn’t or we shouldn’t but rather that we value the current iteration of Terrence-and-Heather (-and-Capa) over the one at the beginning of our relationship. In a funny way, our 2021 wedding season felt like a full bartending shift spent “in the weeds” where we never got to look up and kept going from one thing to the next. As the years pass I can’t help but notice the trajectory of our lives and how the previous events prepared us for what came next. Who knows what Capa will mean for our future but if this year was any indication of what’s to come, I can’t fucking wait.
NYE 2015 - One of Heather and I’s first photos together. Taken at a diner on the UWS at ~ 5:00am.
Perfection is a Fiction: NYC and The Andy Warhol Exhibit
NYC Museums | Andy Warhol, The Whitney | Apollo Fields Wedding Photography
Most of my trips to modern art museums are filled with artful dances around statuesque ponderers and remembering to check the arch of my eyebrows as my eyes learn what’s in in fashion right now. With each brightly colored cube, broken television set, or inflatable animal made of metal, my mind is thrown into a metaphysical whirlwind at the hands and mercy of Dadaism and all of its absurdist descendants. Trying to make sense of art when conventional aesthetics is thrown out the window is like walking through a busy foreign marketplace – you know something is being said, you just have no idea what it is. It’s an uncomfortable feeling until you stumble across a piece that makes you stop and tilt your head at different angles as you try to understand a language you do not yet know.
The piece in the background at the top of this post was from my most recent trip to the Andy Warhol exhibit at The Whitney in New York titled Before and After. It’s been said that it’s Warhol’s self-criticism of his own plastic surgery, while others remark that the original magazine advertisement that Warhol borrowed from was inherently anti-Semitic and that that was his intent. It makes me think that perhaps the most beautiful (or tragic) thing about modern art is that we don’t have to understand the intent of the artist and that we can create an entirely new meaning of our own. As I wandered through Warhol’s life of work, I began to learn more and more about the man behind the Campbells can – and to my surprise, something about the lens through which I view the world as well.
When I saw Warhol’s Before and After it made me think of the world of appearances of social media. It made me think, “this is the way we all want to look” (the person on the right), but in reality most of us look like the person on the left. It made me think that perfection is a fiction we want so badly to be true that we curate our lives into Snaps and Instas. That with every filter and post we draw further from reality and the sanity that comes with embracing the hooked-nose image staring back at us in the mirror. Who knows what Warhol actually meant but that’s how it made me feel.
I realized that good art gives you a license to create. It makes you think, but above all it validates all of the crazy ideas that run through your head. If before the Campbells print became famous, Warhol were try to explain that idea to someone else, it would’ve sounded asinine. And perhaps it is. But because Warhol bypassed the potentially paralyzing explain-the-craziness-inside-your-head-to-someone-else-stage of creation, we have a piece of art that makes us, or at least me, sit and think for a second. It eventually spurred me to organize my thoughts and put them onto this paper.
I guess the lesson is that perfection is a fiction and I prefer to live in reality. When I stood like any of the other entitled museum-goers at Warhol’s Before and After I immediately liked the image on the right more. You can’t help the urge to like what is aesthetically more pleasing, but learning to accept and appreciate our imperfections confronts the real rather than filtering it out.
