About

I have been photographing

weddings in Ghana since 2017

Three hundred and ten of them, in fourteen regions and four countries. Here is how I work, and what I think a wedding photograph is actually for.

The photographer

My aunt handed me a camera at a wedding in Osu and never got it back

That was 2014, at my cousin's engagement, and I spent the whole afternoon in the corner of a compound in Osu photographing the aunties arguing over the list. Nobody asked me to. Three years and a great many unpaid Saturdays later I photographed my first wedding for money, badly, in Tema.

Since then it has been about thirty weddings a year and never more, because a photographer taking sixty is not at any of them properly. I work in two cameras and available light, I do not run a shot list, and I would rather miss a posed group than the moment behind it — though in practice I get both, because I turn up early and I know where everybody will be.

The studio is a room in East Legon with a print table and a wall of albums. Come and look through them; that is what they are for.

— Album

9

Years photographing weddings

310

+

Weddings, engagements and after-shoots

14

Regions of Ghana worked in

4

Countries travelled to for a couple

The photographer at work with a camera raised to her eye

How I work

Three things I decided early

and have not changed since

The best frame is the one nobody noticed me take

I do not direct a room. I learn where everyone will be standing before the day starts, and then I stand somewhere useful and wait. A wedding photographed by somebody moving people around is a wedding you can see being photographed.

Available light, almost always

Flash goes on at the reception and comes off again the moment the dancing starts. Everything before that is the light that was actually in the room, which is the light you will remember the day in.

The engagement is not the warm-up

It is the wedding your grandmother recognises. I photograph it with the same two cameras, the same hours and the same care as the Saturday, and I say so here because plenty of studios quietly do not.

The studio's story

Bookings

Tell me about your day,

and where the light will be

Half an hour, no charge, at the studio in East Legon or on a call. I take about thirty weddings a year and one a day, so the earlier you write the more likely your Saturday is still open.

Check your date