This month I was named one of American PHOTO’s top ten wedding photographers for 2008!
What an honor this is! Thank you Lindsay Sakraida, writer for American PHOTO Magazine, for the interview and write up. My interview was inspired by the destination Indian weddings that I shoot.
Excerpt: For Karen Wise, there was little possibility of falling victim to wedding photography convention; before her career informally began with a friend’s wedding, she had only been to one small one in her entire life. “At the time, I really had no idea about the traditional wedding rituals,” she says of her first assignment. “The first dance, the cake cutting, and all that. I think not knowing the conventions helped me to take interesting photos. It made my shooting very photojournalistic since I was discovering a lot of wedding traditions as I shot.”
She was armed, however, with a fine-art degree and extensive experience photographing food and still life, which came in handy in her matrimonial endeavors. “I found I had to take all of these skills and speed them up in order to capture everything I wanted to get,” she says. “I found that to be exhilarating.” Her colorful, detail-oriented style has attracted numerous clients in the New York area, where she is based; but she has shot weddings as far away as India, including one in which a baby elephant was given as a wedding gift, popular musician Abida Parveen performed in the garden from Monsoon Wedding, decor was coordinated with guests’ outfits, and famed shoe-designer Christian Louboutin hand-delivered the footwear. “A photographer couldn’t ask for a more inspiring setting [Udaipur’s palaces] in which to create beautiful photographs,” Wise says. “Everywhere you looked was beautiful and photogenic.” But she once again had to learn on her feet about traditions she was unfamiliar with: those of a full-blown Indian nuptial extravaganza. – Lindsey Sakraida
Flapper Style Brooklyn Wedding
