hybridian

That’s the phrase I was after in my previous journal, not trial by fire. Nobody died. Which is a good thing, considering it was a wedding!

It was… things moved so fast. I had very little time to be nervous – I’ve not moved around so much, so quickly, nor had to think on my feet so consistently, for years. I didn’t count the number of people that eventually showed up for the ceremony, but 600-odd seems about right. Huge hall, filled to bursting. Not just Indians (and as it turned out, it was actually Sri Lankan, though I see a lot of similarities in their customs) – lots of Westerners, and more Asians than I expected.

The ceremony itself (held at the hall) was long and (for the participants) tedious, as I was warned… but for a photographer, it was an orgy of possibilities. Such colour! Sri Lankans/Indians have such wonderful costumes/clothing, and the number of little traditions and rituals they must observe at a traditional wedding is truly stupefying. My brother and I had a great deal of difficulty working out what was actually important and what wasn’t, since we couldn’t understand what the priest (or whatever the Sri Lankan equivalent is) was saying, nor the responses that the bride and groom were giving.

We missed, or nearly missed, a lot of the ‘important’ moments simply because they were jam-packed in with a whole bunch of less-important moments. There was no discernible fanfare before the big events happened – stuff like the rings being brought out (I’m so pleased I caught that – even though I didn’t actually know what I was looking at for a few seconds, I knew it was something I should just focus on and shoot), or the dot being painted on her forehead to signify that she was now considered a married woman, etc.

A few things stood out to me.

1. The incredible number of coconuts, bananas, and carnations. Seriously.

2. The incense. I’d forgotten how much I love the smell of sandalwood – both the groom’s house (where I shot in the morning) and the ceremony hall had incense burning.

3. The colours. As I mentioned earlier – there were so many. Really vibrant, amazing patterns and decorations – such a feast for the eyes. And the lens!

4. The presence of fire everywhere. They had candles, incense tapers, decorative oil lamps and an ACTUAL fire (that last one was only at the ceremony) all over the place.

5. The crazy amount of symbolism present in their attire, the household and hall decorations, and the rituals observed. Lots of roosters, peacocks, what looked like stylised fish, bowls of fruit, plates of little unidentified cubes, oil, paints, ashes… the list goes on.

6. The way in which the 600+ people (the ones I was so worried about) almost totally ignored what was happening on stage until the end, when they could come up to congratulate the bride and groom personally. I couldn’t get over that. It was like two different worlds – the people having a big get-together down below, and this ceremony happening on stage. Under the stage lights that the videographer brought, and with smoky incense and all those colours surrounding me, it felt a great deal like a dream.

It was, overall, an amazing experience – one that I was privileged to witness as a photographer (it’s not something you get to do every day – wander freely around a foreign wedding ceremony and take close-up shots of a bunch of strangers and what amount to very esoteric practices without anyone arresting you – especially when it’s so beautiful and colourful). I can understand my brother’s aversion to doing wedding photography, though – there are a lot of expectations riding on the day, no matter what culture you’re dealing with, and people are easily stressed out.

Also, for a typical Western wedding, the end results are nice, but not anything terribly special – the amount of effort put in to the whole affair really does come out as results, and in the case of this Sri Lankan wedding, the results were superb, and made all of it – the heat, the exhaustion, the waking-up-at-5:30, the shooting-nonstop-for-nearly-12-hours, the not-understanding-what-everyone-was-saying – very well worth it.

About the only thing that soured the experience for me was what happened at the groom’s house, in the early morning. I was ostensibly there as the primary photographer, but as I discovered, no less than six of the groom’s relatives had amateur-to-pro photography experience, and it seriously ended up being a contest of whose lens was bigger… it was ridiculous. They were all men, and I happen to have a very basic kit – no flash, and only a couple of interchangeable lenses – so when people looked around at the cameras, they certainly weren’t focusing on me as the one to smile at and/or pose for. I found it hard to assert myself, since I’m naturally a fairly wallflower-esque person in strange surroundings; and being small and female and the only one who didn’t speak the dialect didn’t help, either. There were people crowding everywhere, and I didn’t know when rituals were being performed because all the instructions/whatever were being given in a language I didn’t understand, and aside from those six men, ten other people had little point and shoot cameras. Fighting for space to take a good shot, in a normal house, with about thirty-five other people, was… difficult, to say the least.

It didn’t start my day off well, but things went much better at the hall, and I’m still glad that I decided to do it.