We Are Gathered Here

Angela Cappetta’s We Are Gathered Here is a monograph of documentary wedding photography, bringing together more than a decade of candid photographs made before smartphones changed the way we experience and photograph gatherings. Rather than focusing onl

“Her pictures are unsparing yet affectionate, attuned to the way nerves, vanity and genuine emotion collide.”Dr. Shana Lopes, Photography Curator SFMOMA

The introduction a wedding officiant gives—“We are gathered here . . . ,” the first words we hear as we assemble—is a meditation on the power of the unpolluted collective. Woven into the work, hidden in plain sight, is a main character: the gathering itself. The events seen in this volume flaunt what the last weddings looked like before smartphones. Devices held aloft (or surreptitiously consulted) are pleasantly absent. Here are disconnected flashes of the party between long blinks. It’s very human, very real. Documentary wedding photography in We Are Gathered Here explores gatherings as the main character.

When the micro-screen launched in the summer of 2007, things immediately shifted. That execrable pocket device made a marked fray in the weft and weave of human connection. Arguably, the pictures I made in the period “before” are a time machine marking a clear division between then and now in contemporary art.