Andy
: ?What does incessant photography make impossible? Perhaps a real experience of the present.?[Wedding guests who double as amateur photographers] do not see themselves as intruding upon the event, but as absenting themselves from it in order to bestow the gift of . . . precious memories (which always requires the foreboding ellipsis). They sacrifice their ordinary presence at the mere wedding to become a selfless, invisible recording eye, as though they occupied some interstitial space between the sacred, but still physical one of the church and—what, exactly? The not-yet-embodied future? It strikes me that they think they are made angels by the camera, observers unobserved.
But there they were, still in their bodies, perfectly visible to everyone.
And who in the world were they? My wife told me later that she stopped the one on the side aisle by catching his eye, shaking her head, and fiercely mouthing the word No. Crestfallen, he retreated. The other one, however, a young woman, angled across the front of the church in front of the pulpit, went through the entrance to the sacristy, and emerged behind a carved wooden grate where she stationed herself for the next half-hour intermittently flashing away like an expert sniper at the bride and groom.