Let us now consider The Wedding, an event with an argot all its own, an occasion of solemnity, comedy, potential tragedy, and banality. There are other life rituals, more or at least as significant. As E. M. Forster wrote, "We move between two darknesses. The two entities who might enlighten us, the baby and the corpse, cannot do so." Perhaps I betray a certain absence of festive attitude here. Fine, but in between these darknesses, life does present only a few monumental passages available for broader review. Birth and death and their attendant participants are usually, as it were, unlikely to present themselves for cinematic posterity.
Not so the wedding. The union into marriage of two souls has been deemed an event suitable for witnessment by the florist, the baker, the organist, the altar boys, the musicians, the limousine driver, the waiters, a gaggle of pals known as the bridesmaids and best man, and alas, the photographer.
Let us consider for a moment the responsibility of this photographer, the archivist, the memoirist, the one whose view of the whole contraption is to be memorialised. Perhaps the happy couple will together, some 60 years later, lovingly pore over the poignant visual memories of that momentous day. "Look at Aunt Sheila's hairdo!" our couple will exclaim in unison. "Didn't father look handsome? . . . There was no sign of the malignancy even though it was only a few weeks before the diagnosis," they might say, a grateful tear brought to the eye as the last picture of dad is considered.
Or, as likely as not, some psychotherapist may suggest setting flame to the wedding album years later as a ritualistic way for the wronged ex-spouse to find "closure" to a mistaken relationship. (We kid not. Such recommendations do occur.)
It is into this latter-day vortex of psychodrama that the photographer walks.
Now, in truth, most avoid the risk of revelation, the risk of anything substantive. Not so Patricia Decker. This 54-year-old Greenwich Village resident, armed with Hasselblads and Leicas dangling from her broad shoulders like ground-to-air artillery, marches into pre-wedding receptions, events replete with tension and anxiety, and gently commands a bride's fidgety mother: "We have to go to the church soon. You should go upstairs and get dressed."
Without a word, mother nods and obeys. In this case, at this particular wedding in Brooklyn, New York, on a fine March day, mother happens to be a psychiatrist. There are those who would pay substantial sums just to witness a New York psychiatrist obeying orders.
But this particular wedding goes beyond the confines of a Woody Allen movie. The groom's family has just arrived from Shanghai. They sit stiffly in the chaotic living-room of the Brooklyn psychiatrist, inquiring in Chinese, we learn only later, about when they may expect grandchildren. The groom has the demeanour of one of those inmates in a Texas prison doing an interview with CNN. This is a major cross-cultural event; no one is quite sure what to do, or how not to offend. The uncertainty is resulting in a lot of bowing, grunting, straightening of shirt collars, and whispered conversations into cellular phones. It is up to Ms Decker, it appears, to put everyone at ease while keeping the festivities moving according to schedule.
Ms Decker laughs at the recollection a week after the event. "I find myself in that position often," she says. "You become a part of these things. It can get very intimate. I actually like it that way. I get disappointed if it isn't intimate."
Instead of the stiff and posed wedding portraiture that we have come to think of as wedding photography, Patricia Decker aims for candid photos, unconventional pictures that capture the essence of the day, whatever that may be. She will do the standard bride and groom "shot". But that is not what interests her most.
"I was pretty sarcastic about this when I started," says Ms Decker, who shifted her work from painting to photography about 10 years ago. "I am a 1960s' person. I didn't get married until I was 40. I didn't even believe in marriage. What did I know of romance?"
What she found out, what she learned that she knew, was that she could witness and record something beautiful between two people, between families, even between cultures. It was not always traditional, but what Ms Decker records in weddings is real. It can also be gruelling.
There have been three-day wedding celebrations in Seattle, events that involved portraits of Coho salmon being cooked on the beach, a group massage of a naked bride, and 60 loaves of bread being prepared.
There have been three-day wedding celebrations in Seattle, events that involved portraits of Coho salmon being cooked on the beach, a group massage of a naked bride, and 60 loaves of bread being prepared.
There have been wedding rings exchanged in oyster shells.
Then there was the Hindu wedding in Trinidad, an event that involved 1,500 people and a three-day ceremony that included a traditional group of virgins (they had to find seven- and eight-year-old girls to fit the bill) rubbing saffron over a blindfolded bride's body until she turned a buttery yellow.
The sweet potatoes and beans diet took their toll. "It was June and it was hot and everything I ate was spicy," said Ms. Decker. "I was so sick."
BUT it is worth it to this woman whose eclectic past includes a stint as a co-owner of a renowned West Village restaurant called Elephant and Castle (the original restaurant of the species now in Temple Bar). This is hard work, more physically draining than one might expect. She could be taking advertising pictures, voluptuous still-life photographs of boxes of laundry detergent. She could be enjoying the spring-blooming plants on her roof garden. She could even be in Kosovo.
But nothing else is quite like the chance to be with people in an intense moment of hope . . . and fear. With her lens, unforgiving and trained on frailty, she gets to show people to themselves. She gets to record people as they are exposing their most vulnerable selves. Is it all about love?
Perhaps, as the poet Denise Levertov wrote in her poem The Ache of Marriage, it is the dissonance itself rather than love that Ms Decker seeks to illustrate:
The ache of marriage:
thigh and tongue, beloved,
are heavy with it
it throbs in the teeth
We look for communion
and are turned away, beloved,
each and each
It is leviathan and we
in its belly
looking for joy, some joy
not to be known outside it
two by two in the ark of
the ache of it.
Now really. Who could resist, armed with the ultimate tool of our time, a camera aimed at humans confronting the millennium, the opportunity to score such a terrifying libretto?