Roxy & Scott — An Alassos Wedding in Paphos, Cyprus

Some weddings tell you what they want to look like within about ten minutes of arriving. Roxy and Scott's was one of them. Small guest list, no rush anywhere in the schedule, and a couple who were entirely uninterested in performing for a camera. We shot the whole day in black and white and delivered it that way.

That decision is worth explaining, because we make it rarely. Colour earns its place at most Cyprus weddings: the sea, the flowers, the light on old stone. Here the day was built almost entirely out of whites, creams and blacks, and stripping the colour out let the textures and the faces carry it instead.

Morning, and a bottle of Asti

The morning ran the way the best ones do, which is to say slowly. Roxy in a white pyjama set, her bridesmaids in dark satin with white piping, coupe glasses handed round with ribbon tags on the stems reading "Bride" and "Ready to Wed". Somebody had brought slippers.

Preparation coverage lives or dies on whether the room is relaxed. Nobody was watching us, which is exactly what you want, and it meant the whole first hour photographs as a series of things that were happening anyway rather than things arranged for us.

Alassos in hard afternoon light

Roxy came out into the courtyard in a strapless satin gown with detached sheer sleeves scattered with pearls, a pearl-dotted veil running well past the train, and a bouquet of white roses and gypsophila. Scott wore a light double-breasted suit with a dark tie.

Alassos gives you white rendered walls, terracotta pantiles, a tall cypress, and olive trees in pots by the entrance. In full afternoon sun that combination is high-contrast and slightly unforgiving, which suits monochrome far better than it suits colour. The shadows do the work.

This is a good argument for what a dedicated wedding venue buys you. There were no hotel guests wandering through the background of the portraits and no shared terrace to negotiate. We walked out, made photographs on the grass for fifteen or twenty minutes, and walked back. That was the whole portrait session.

Into the evening

The party moved under the perforated canopy, where the ceiling throws hundreds of small points of light across everything below it. We slowed the shutter and let the guests blur around the two of them.

It's the frame that closes the set, and the one that argues hardest for the black and white. In colour it would have been a dance floor. Without it, it's the two of them in the middle of a lot of movement.