On almost every first call, a couple asks me some version of the same question: "are you going to tell us what to do?" Underneath it is a real decision they're trying to make, and most of what's written about it is written by people selling one of the two answers.
So here is the fair version, including the part my side of the argument usually leaves out.
What the two words actually mean
Posed means the photographer authors the image. They place you, adjust the light, correct the hands, and take the picture when it looks right. The photograph is made.
Documentary means the photographer waits for the image. They read the room, anticipate where something is about to happen, and press the shutter when it does. The photograph is found.
Everything else — "candid", "editorial", "fine art", "photojournalistic" — is a variation on those two verbs: made or found.
What posing genuinely gives you
I don't work this way, but I'd be lying if I said it had no advantages, and you should weigh them properly.
You get certainty. Everyone is in the frame, eyes open, in good light. Your grandmother gets the portrait she'll actually frame. If your family is large and scattered, a directed group photo may be the only time all of you are in one place for the next decade — that's not a small thing, and no amount of documentary purity replaces it.
You also get consistency. A posed wedding is far less dependent on luck. If the ceremony runs late and the light dies, a photographer who builds images can still build them.
What documentary gives you
You get the day as it actually was. Not a version of it arranged to look better, but the real sequence: the nervous laugh before walking out, the hug that lasted a second too long, your father's face when he wasn't performing it for anyone.
The strongest argument for it is one I only understood years in. The photographs couples cry over aren't the technically perfect ones. They're the ones where someone recognises the exact moment they were feeling something and didn't know a camera was there.
What you give up is control. You will not get the shot where fifteen guests look at the lens smiling in unison, because that shot requires someone to stop the wedding and build it.
The part we usually leave out
Here's where most articles on this subject quietly cheat, including ones I could have written a few years ago.
There is no such thing as a photographer who doesn't intervene. I use flash. I process files. I adjust colour and temperature, I lift shadows, I crop. I choose a 35mm instead of an 85mm, and that choice alone changes how close the room feels and how much of it you see. If I convert an image to black and white, I've stripped out information and replaced it with mood — that's a decision, not a truth.
Even standing still is a choice. Where I put my feet decides what's in the frame and what's outside it, and what's outside the frame is edited out just as surely as if I'd removed it afterward.
So "documentary" cannot honestly mean "untouched". Anyone claiming otherwise is selling purity they don't practice.
So where is the line?
For me it isn't between using tools and not using them. It's between honouring what happened and fabricating something that didn't.
I'll raise a flash so a moment in a dark room survives — because without that light you'd never see it. I won't ask two people to hug again because I missed it. The first decision serves something real. The second manufactures a memory and hands it to you as evidence.
That's the whole rule, and it's more useful than any style label: does this decision help the moment reach you, or does it invent the moment?
Almost every wedding is a hybrid, and that's fine
The honest reality is that very few weddings are one or the other.
Most days include a window — usually after the ceremony — where the couple steps away and someone takes portraits. That is directed, by definition. I do it, and I don't pretend it's documentary. What I try to do is keep it short, keep it loose, and get out of the way again, because the rest of the day is where the photographs I actually care about are.
If someone tells you they never direct anything, ask what happens during family photos. The answer will tell you how carefully they think about their own work.
How to decide which you want
Rather than choosing a label, ask yourself two questions.
What do you want to feel when you open the gallery in ten years? If the answer is "we looked incredible", a directed photographer will serve you better and you should hire one without guilt. If the answer is "that's exactly how it was", you want documentary.
How much of your day are you willing to spend on photographs? Posed coverage costs time — real time, taken out of your own wedding. Documentary coverage costs certainty. There's no option that costs nothing.
And when you talk to a photographer, the question that reveals the most isn't "what's your style?" It's: what would you do if the best moment of the day happened in bad light, behind a pillar, with someone's back turned? Whatever they answer is their actual philosophy, and it's more honest than anything on their website.
Where I stand
I photograph weddings without directing them, and I've written separately about how that works in practice across a wedding day — the light, the movement, what it feels like from your side.
But the reason behind it isn't a style preference. I think intervening in something real in order to improve it is a quiet way of telling that moment it wasn't enough. I wrote a book about that idea and where it took me, called The Word Became Image; the opening chapter is about exactly this, and you can read the first pages on that page.