Ana wrote to me eighteen months before the wedding with a single sentence: “We want it to feel like lunch at my grandmother’s, just longer.” That turned into a forty-metre table under the olive trees, a ceremony by the pool and three days of family who hadn’t all been in one place since 1998.
I arrived on Thursday, the day the tables were built. Most of my favourite photographs from the weekend come from those quiet hours — uncles arguing about levelling, cousins folding two hundred napkins, Tomás’s father asleep in a deckchair with a hammer on his chest.
The ceremony
Saturday’s ceremony was short and very loud. The balloons were Ana’s sister’s idea; they caught the wind at exactly the right moment and I have never been so grateful for a gust. I worked from the back and the sides, never the aisle — nobody should have to look past a photographer to see their daughter get married.
“Mira never asked us to pose. She just disappeared into the day.”
The long lunch
Lunch started at two and ended, officially, at eleven. I put one camera down for an hour and ate with everyone, which is how I got the frame of the grandmothers dancing — I was sitting right there, fork in hand, when the accordion started.
Sunday was for the friends. The after-party moved to the barn, then the pool, then back to the barn. These are the frames couples rarely expect and always print.
