One November, a few years ago I was making a video programme for a museum in the French Alps. It included a ceremony to honour Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory who, in 1945, died in a crash above the village in which the museum stands. A friend of mine, an accomplished cornetist, was playing the Last Post – the RAF having decided it couldn’t afford a bugler to honour one of its most notable senior officers. We were covering the event with just two cameras, all that the modest budget allowed. The British press was represented by the Daily Telegraph’s then chief correspondent in France, Colin Randall, and an agency photographer. It was cold and snowing yet we all maintained our positions, leaving the focus of the ceremony on the memory of Leigh-Mallory and respect for the bravery of the French villagers who, 60 years earlier, had recovered the bodies from the mountains. Like the press coverage, our programme was widely praised.
I recalled the event as I watched the coverage of the memorial ceremony in Basra to mark the withdrawal of British servicemen. The thing that struck me, apart from some occasional sloppy direction of the television images, was the number of uniformed people treating the ceremony as if it was still the parade ground it is in everyday life. These Army photographers and video cameramen, of whom there seemed an excessive number to do the job, completely ignored the solemnity and dignity of the occasion. Even at the most solemn moments, the playing of the Last Post, and the recitation of the memorial prayer to the dead (“in the morning we shall remember them”), they wandered around, snapping everything that moved like amateurs at a photo fair. Happily neither of my children is in the Forces; had I been one of those whose son or daughter has died in Iraq, I think I would have been very angry at the lack of simple respect these people were showing.
I feel the same way at weddings. As I’ve written before, we video and photo people may be working but that doesn’t absolve us of the responsibility to respect the dignity of the occasion we are recording. At PHP Weddings we always say that we do not create the wedding but simply record it. Our creativity is worked afterwards in the editing. At our weddings the only stars are the bridal couple – which is the way we believe all weddings should be.
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