PRIYA THARMASEELAN
About
I don’t photograph the events that occur at your wedding. I photograph the reasons you are getting married.
I was born in Sri Lanka, and lived the first eleven years of my life during a civil war. I survived by finding moments of beauty that emerged by accident. Before my hands held a camera I had begun relating to the world as a series of interconnected frames that highlighted the beauty and hope of all that is living, an implicit resilience that continues to remind us that love is the universal force that animates all things. The red hibiscus that found its way to the light through the cracks of fallen fences. The aunty across the street, with her cup of tea, her face illuminated by candlelight. The joy in a child’s face at the sound of the ice cream truck turning the corner.
I photograph more than that which can be seen with the eye. I photograph those flashes of light and love and hope that find their way into and out of our separateness to create connections between souls whose resonance outlives the bounds of time and space. This is the foundation through which my eyes see the world.
Mozart said that music is not within the notes themselves, but between them. It is not the sounds themselves that capture our being in a particular moment, but the relationships between them. This is what I photograph. I photograph the two of you and your guests not in isolation, but as you connect as the day unfolds. I capture what you think of about one another before you are able to express those feelings in words. Humanist philosopher and physician, Albert Schweitzer noted that “the only things of importance, when we depart, are the traces of love we leave behind.” My joy comes from creating a photograph of these “traces of love” between humans. With the lapse of time, your wedding photographs will not only engage your memory, they will allow you to relive the moments that engage your souls. Those scared moments where nothing else existed in the universe except for that glance, that smile, that embrace.
This photograph of a groom’s grandfather bears witness to love’s capacity to connect two humans over the course of an entire lifetime. He is preparing a plate of food for his wife in a wheelchair prior to making a plate for himself. He has Alzheimer’s, so he needs to focus intently on the simple act of devotion. In this moment we see a commitment spanning decades whose “traces of love” reminds us who we are and why we are here.
