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King of Hearts

© Cliff Mautner Loading...

© Cliff Mautner

Nikon D2Xs, Aperture Priority, Shutter Speed 1/40 sec., f/2.5, Focal Length 50mm, ISO 500

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After 700 "I do's," photographer Cliff Mautner still isn't tired of photographing weddings.

I wake up in the morning and say to myself, ‘Today I'm going to make a picture,'" he says. "This attitude allows me to set out with a high level of expectation."

It didn't start out that way. In fact Mautner turned down his first opportunity to photograph a wedding back in 1996. Or at least he tried to.

 

"A corporate client asked me to shoot his daughter's wedding," recalls Mautner, who was a photographer for the Philadelphia Inquirer at the time and had a few commercial clients. "At first I said no, and he reminded me that I was on retainer. He was joking, but he said, ‘I know you're not a wedding photographer, but I want you to approach this as you would a news story.' I came away with the understanding that I could not just shoot a wedding and tolerate it, but that I could shoot it and love it."

 

Mautner began to pursue wedding photography, slowly building his business to a point where he could "break away completely from journalism and make something out of it." He left the newspaper the next year and now shoots 50 to 60 weddings a year.

 

In 2008 Mautner was named one of the top ten wedding photographers in the world by American Photo Magazine. In 2009 he won the grand award for photojournalism from Wedding and Portrait Photographers International.

 

What's the secret? Mautner relies on his background as a photojournalist—he shot more than 6,000 assignments for the Inquirer over 15 years.

 

"The days of the bride and groom staring at the camera under the gazebo have long been over," he says. "The photojournalism approach has evolved over the past 15 years."

 

Mautner's images sometimes contrast the elegance of a bride on her wedding day against the urban grit of cities like Philadelphia. He'll have his couples interact under a bridge, for example, or on the various urban-scapes. "I try to incorporate an eclectic array of scenarios into the wedding day itself so that it gets a little bit further from the norm."

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