The great sixteenth-century Italian artist Benvenuto Cellini once wrote, "The art of sculpture is eight times as great as any other art based on drawing, because a statue has eight views and they must all be equally good."

I'm laughing as I type this, because exactly forty-seven seconds ago I wouldn't have been able to tell you who Benvenuto Cellini was. Looking for something witty to say about sculpture, I Googled, and was drawn to the name "Cellini" because it bore some similarity to "Celina," who happened to marry David at the sprawling Grounds for Sculpture near Princeton, N.J. recently.

(It also was a heck of a lot better than the other quote: "The plague had by this time almost died out, so that the survivors, when they met together alive, rejoiced with much delight in one another's company." I always figure that unless one is discussing Monty Python, it's best to leave plagues and such out of wedding discussions.)

But happy accidents are my favorite kind and now I'm glad I stumbled across my old friend Cellini. He makes a valid point. We've become so used to looking at things one-dimensionally--the 50" flat screen television set in the living room, our iPad2, the morning newspaper. Cellini reminds us that things only get interesting when we walk around, look deeper, open ourselves to different interpretations.

I'm quite sure that both Celina Fang and David Urban and just about everyone in their respective families and circles of friends would agree with this, considering how many of them have advanced degrees and how many currently work in academia. Given that my own father is a mathematician (and retired college professor), my two older brothers have PhDs, one in physics and one in classics, and that my younger brother teaches film directing at Columbia, I felt immediately at home with the Fangs and Urbans. There were enough math degrees, library science degrees, arabic degrees (you name it) floating around that I felt like I was back in the Library Tower in Binghamton, New York, circa 1981. The pre-wedding banter was of an exceptionally high level of wittiness, with nary a word about shrimp size or tablecloth patterns.

I had never been to the Grounds for Sculpture before. It's quite the amazing place: forty-two acres of manicured landscape all dedicated to one type of artistic pursuit. Modern sculpture, ancient sculpture, big and small it's all represented here. I saw a version of the F.D.R. "bread line" sculpture by George Segal, a piece I always love passing at cherry blossom time here in Washington, as well as some fun, almost-kitschy interpretations of French impressionism by Seward Johnson.

David and Celina chose to have their ceremony amidst the popular "Nine Muses" piece by Carlos Dorrien, an homage to an ancient Greek ruin. As per that initial quote from Cellini, hosting the wedding at this particular piece gave it a multi-dimensional quality one rarely sees. David's sister presided over the affair, with the wedding party actually within the body of the artwork. It was a fitting arena for two people who clearly love the art which surrounded them.

In fact, as we raced around the grounds looking for places to shoot (on a very hot day, though Celina was remarkably unfazed), I kept having to pull out my little map. But Celina and David knew practically every sculpture--and there are thousands--by heart. This was not some token catering hall to them. They're too smart for that.

To see a mini gallery of pictures from the wedding of Celina Fang and David Urban, CLICK HERE.

Take care,

Matt

Despite their last names, it may come as surprise to learn that neither Wendy Li or David McElhoe is Jewish. (I kid, needless to say, probably because I am.) But when their band launched into the Hora late in the evening at Stotesbury Mansion in Philadelphia last month, no one--not the groom, not the bride nor a single guest--missed the opportunity to start dancing in circles. And when two chairs were produced, David and Wendy laughed their heads off as they were hoisted above their friends and family.

That's probably all you need to know about these guys. You have to love a couple that can incorporate a cultural tradition from outside their own upbringing and have a blast doing it. "We love the tradition of the Hora," Wendy told me. "David has had to lift so many chairs at other weddings that we figured it was his turn. And I've just always wanted to be up on the chair!"

Sounds good to me. Come to think of it, so did the snow cone machine that Wendy surprised David with later in the night. Horas and snow cones: like singing Take Me Out to the Ballgame, they both have that wonderful ability to produce a smile in a six-year-old or grandparent alike.

Wendy and David's wedding was full of smiles, from early in the day at the hotel to late in the evening at Stotesbury. When I arrived, Wendy was sitting on the floor of her room feeding soup to her younger sister. (Most brides I know would be too scared to attempt soup.) David was down the block, laughing as he helped Wendy's little brother get dressed. (Let's just say that more than a few safety pins were needed to shorten a shirt!)

The couple met up in the center of Rittenhouse Square, which was its typical hustling, bustling self. Hundreds of Philadelphians out enjoying their weekend crowded the square, but we managed to shoot around all but one or two. After some beautiful family pics, we all walked over to the mansion for the ceremony.

That's where another unexpected moment popped up, one that I have a feeling I'll be looking at for a long time. Not seeing a bride or groom for a while, I asked where they had disappeared to. "They're in the bathroom practicing their first dance," I was told. I couldn't resist the potential of that and nudged my way in. Like any photographer, I thought at first that a picture showing that we were, well, in a bathroom would be the way to go. But after seeing Wendy leap into David's arms and get spun around, I was just hoping to get anything. This was a fairly tight space! Let's just say that I'm pleased with the result.

After a long honeymoon in Asia (Cambodia--tops on my wish list), they're probably feeling like all the excitement is slowing down. That's why I'm happy to remind them with these pictures of how much fun they had.

To see a mini gallery of pics from the wedding of Wendy Li and David McElhoe, click here.

Take care,

Matt

Sarah McCalla and RJ Johnsen didn't actually get married at Hogwarts Academy, home to Harry, Hermione et al., but since this is the summer of the last film, and since St. Albans School has been open for a century now and has that long communal table look down pat, it almost feels like they did.

RJ is the baseball coach at St. Albans, where instruction began way back in 1909. (Abner Doubleday would have been dead for only ten years by that point!) Sarah is a teacher as well. And these guys are both perfectly suited for their chosen paths, working with young people. They both laugh an inordinate amount, which is always a healthy thing, and both have the perfect demeanor for kids.

And they chose to hold their wedding right where they now reside. The ceremony was in the tiny St. Albans chapel and their reception was held in the dining room at the school. It was a wise choice. Hotel ballrooms may date back a decade or so but it's virtually impossible to step foot into St. Albans and not be swept away by the history. The dining room, besides looking like it could be a suitable home for the houses of Gryffindor and Slytherin, oozes with the memory of students from long ago, their names each etched upon wooden plaques that line the walls. Maybe it's the style of painting--the "font", if you will--but looking at each name makes one wonder where those students are today. Students from the 40's, the 50's, the Vietnam era--they're all there on the wall. 

Thirty years from now, when Sarah and RJ's children might be getting married, they can come back to St. Albans and tour the place where mom and dad were wed. And everything will be exactly as it is today, just a lot more names on the walls. You have to love a place like that.

Thirty years is a long time. Sarah and RJ are just going on one month or marriage this week and becasue of that, I'm going to cut things short today. We're getting a little backed up here at Matt Mendelsohn World Headquarters and I know these guys want to see some pictures. So rather than me droning on, I'll give you some pics instead.

On a personal note, we're going to be on vacation for the next two weeks, so if I don't get back to your emails and phone calls right away, be patient. Enjoy the last throes of summer!

And to see a mini-gallery of pictures from the wedding of RJ Johnsen and Sarah McCAlla, click here.

Matt

For many years now, I've been writing blog posts about weddings in a manner a little different than many of my colleagues. Many wedding photographers seem to strive for a bit of financial synergy in their recaps. These are blog posts that mention who did the flowers, who the make-up artist was, the name of the catering manager. I have no issue with that, mind you, but it seems a bit dull to me; essentially a you-scratch-my-back-and-I'll-scratch-yours solution for future business referrals.

I've always been fascinated by the actual stories behind these weddings. After 450 weddings since 1999, I've seen just about everything—big weddings, small affairs, romantic dinners, tension-fraught debacles. No matter what, they all share one thing in common: a compelling story. Often these stories are obvious, sometimes less so.

Back in October of 1999 I photographed the wedding of Susan Heinberg and Andrei Oleinik. It was a small affair, beginning with a ceremony at St. John's in Georgetown and ending with a cozy dinner. I had met Susan's mom, Beverly Brockus, earlier, when I went to photograph one of Washington's best-known chefs, Ris Lacoste, for USA Today. Ris was a hot chef at 1789, a Georgetown landmark, and Beverly was in the marketing department. We all had a good time at that shoot.

As always, one job (photographing Ris) led to another (shooting Beverly's daughter's wedding), and the daisy chain was started. Twelve years later, Ris Lacoste has her own restaurant, named Ris, appropriately, and Susan and Andrei have two boys, named Nikita and Peter. And best of all, I received a very excited email a few months back from Beverly asking if I would photograph her impending marriage to John A. Shaud.

Beverly wrote the following note to me:

We met in the best possible way—at a dinner party given by mutual friends in July, 2010. The men were West Point classmates. At the end of the evening, we sat in the driveway and talked for 30 minutes.  

Even though we were from different worlds—John in the Air Force and me in the food world—we had important things in common. Each of us had lost a spouse to cancer in 2006 after a longtime marriage, and our children and grandchildren are central to our lives. Both of us grew up in the Midwest, and we felt an immediate familiarity and comfort as we spoke openly about our families and our lives. We both appreciate all that the Washington area offers and the extraordinary people who are drawn here from around the world. 

Our hostess swears that the coffee was decaffeinated, but we later learned that neither of us could sleep that night.  We had our first date the following evening, before John left town for two weeks. We stayed in touch by email.  

When he returned, we both realized that something powerful was happening. From then on, John called me every morning and evening.  

We both love a Dag Hammerskjold quotation “To all that has been – thanks. To all that is yet to be – yes!” That was the theme of our wedding on July 2, 2011. We will take all of our memories and loved ones with us as we embrace the future together.

It doesn't get any better than that. And you know what was the best part of this little jewel of a wedding? For 450 weddings, I've photographed a father helping a son fix his tie in some hotel room. But as I watched Jim Shaud help his father do the same thing, in the little chapel at St. John's, the same church I had photographed Susan and Andrei's wedding more than a decade earlier, all I could do was smile.

Take care,

Matt

So what's with the title? A bit of a downer for a wedding blog, no?

Well, Only the Dead Know Brooklyn happens to be the title of a short story by Thomas Wolfe, written in 1925 for the New Yorker, which begins, "Dere’s no guy livin’ dat knows Brooklyn t’roo an’ t’roo, because it’d take a guy a lifetime just to find his way aroun’ duh goddam town."

It's no secret I love Thomas Wolfe. Like George Gershwin, who died at the age of thirty-nine in 1937, Wolfe lived an equally short life, succumbing to tuberculosis of the brain when he was just 38, in 1938. In incredibly compacted life spans, both men left a legacy of pure genius, from Rhapsody in Blue and Concerto in F to Look Homeward, Angel and You Can't Go Home Again. Today, we regularly confer lifetime achievement awards—Kennedy Center Awards, Nobel Prizes—to men and women who are in their sixties and seventies and eighties. Think about this: Gershwin or Wolfe would have completed enough work for such an honor by his 40th birthday, had either lived that long.

I remember reading Only the Dead Know Brooklyn in college in 1980, where I was a literature major taking way too many photographs. Luckily, a professor named John Hagan, a nerdy man with horn-rimmed glasses, was there to save me. I wrote about Professor Hagan last year in a piece for the Binghamton University alumni magazine:

Moby Dick, Portrait of a Lady, Faulkner. We read all the important stuff, though mostly we alternated between nodding off and poking fun at professor Hagan's peculiar speech. Until, that is, the day we began reading Look Homeward, Angel. As it turned out, our teacher was an expert, a former editor of the Thomas Wolfe Quarterly. And when he began to recall his days of sitting on the porch of Wolfe's boyhood home, sipping iced tea with the author's then-surviving brother, the oddest of odd things happened, something my fresh-out-of-Plainview mind couldn't process. I looked up and saw a tear running down Hagan's cheek.

Hamlet famously asks, "What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, that he should weep for her?"when he can't understand how an actor could work himself to tears just for a part in a play. I knew how he felt. But with one teardrop my life's orbit changed trajectory. I never slept in that class again, not a wink. And a year later, when another lit professor, Richard Pindell, slammed his copy of Absalom, Absalom! down on his desk and sighed, "My mamma always told me not to teach anything you love, 'cause your students won't love it as much as you and it'll break your heart," I already understood what he meant. Professor Hagan's unwitting lesson on dedication, sense of place, even memory itself, had already begun its meandering journey.

Earlier this year, I took a quick day trip up to Brooklyn, where the dead may well know a thing or two, but I'm guessing not enough to have invested in real estate in trendy Cobble Hill. That's where I met up with Sarah Robinson and Nils Lundblad, a couple living in Boston, getting married in Washington, but tethered firmly to the place they first fell in love.

Sara, Nils and I walked around their beloved neighborhood, from the coffee shop they once frequented to halfway across the Brooklyn Bridge. It was a great trip, and you could easily see how a southerner like Thomas Wolfe would become enamored of the place. Stoops, park benches, hustle and bustle.

Sarah and Nils are a wonderful couple, always laughing, always smiling. I grinned as much as Sarah did when she opened a letter from her soon-to-be husband in the hotel room early on her wedding day. Stuffed with the note were ticket stubs from all the concerts the two have seen together. What a sweet idea, I thought. In fact, the coolness factor was always in play, from getting ready at the still-hip Hotel Monaco to their reception at the newly-hip LongView Gallery.

And the literary links go even deeper, as Sarah explained to me in her first email back in March, 2010: "Oh, I almost forgot-- I also wanted to let you know that we have a connection: I was your brother’s publicist (I worked at Knopf for five years) for his beautiful Cavafy translations. So I actually saw your work a few years ago, in the form of his author photo. What a small world!"

It is in fact a small world, and that's why I leave you with the following gift, in the form of the second line of Thomas Wolfe's masterpiece, Look Homeward, Angel:

"Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into the nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas." As I typed those words, I thought to myself, what picture should I put here at the end? And then I saw this one.

Look Homeward, Angel, indeed.

To see a mini gallery of pictures from the wedding of Sarah and Nils, click here.

Take care, 

Matt