I captured a word: plan.
In converging lines, straight angles and a drawing larger than life, with paths over countries and chances, I found them in a place sketched onto the horizon with blue and modern strokes.
Echoes bounce out of marbled hallways with monochrome shapes of veils and flowers etched onto it, and I raise my camera towards colour: the shade of an embrace, both a welcome and a goodbye, a reassuring kiss, an anticipating smile. They are different shapes, leaving each other for a later reunion, waiting for the other as soon as they are apart, because they are two matching pieces perfectly fitting as one, only without the rough edges.
I light glimmers in cold bursts of flashes, reflected back by crystals and windows and the heat outside is perfectly described by the shade of her lipstick. Discreet as the shadow added on a sketch for depth, the room where she gets ready becomes a sanctuary filled to the brink by layers and layers of happy plans and roads to the future, clear as this day and vibrant, like the roar of a supercharged engine.
In his plan, the roars come from supporting family and friends, voices pushing his spirit to patience and best wishes in baritone tones. A stranger looks inside this micro universe and feels the joy too, and a child watches this young spirits celebrating happiness with a feeling he recognizes as familiar.
When back together, their smiles are like copy versions of the same feeling, pictured by the same architect. He hugs her in recognition and cools his being in the waves of her hair, because it feels like home. And she feels it too, so I capture her happy, at ease and confident in this feeling.
If for me their story is a destination wedding adventure, for them this is a destined wedding story and those around them seem to know, drink to that and drive them forward down this road through the landscape of a day they own completely.
No snow here, but I find white flowers on bouquets, white on the veils leading to the altar and when the only Yes he ever whished for is said, they step on the white aisle, a metaphor for the black page they turn and prepare to fill as a family.
In candlelight and bright red modern carriage, we arrive at the place where little specks of white fall like snow from petals and crystals, over a first dance in which she raises up like a wish to the sky and he bows down like a thanks to the earth. A motion they’ll keep alive, a perennial memory sweet as the cake under
I documented a wedding in a city that seldom knows white winters, among people that knew nothing less than joy. A crazy alive hustle and bustle we were all honored to be a part of as pieces of the plan, but heard and lived in true meaning only by them and their love.
I thought I was capturing a word. Instead, they told a story.
Wedding venue: Hilton, Abu Dhabi
Videographer: Timeless films by Razvan Cosma
Make-up Artist: Andrea Dumitrache
A thousand images for the same word by Andrei Dumitrache – Documentary Wedding Photographer
The story of those images, by Cătălina în cuvinte