Weddings in
Oaxaca

Both ceremonies I documented there started at midday, and both couples came out a little after one in the afternoon. The interior is gilded baroque covering the vault and the walls — one of the most imposing spaces I have ever worked in, and the light coming in from the sides does almost all the work. What I find most valuable is not the church itself but what happens on the way out: the forecourt is enormous, and the calenda sets off right there, with the green cantera façade behind it. If that is where you are getting married, it has a page of its own: how a Santo Domingo wedding is booked, with the paperwork, the restrictions and the full hours of that day.

The opposite face of the same state. The Mitla wedding I photographed ran in daylight, between about half past eleven in the morning and half past two in the afternoon, and the setting is Zapotec stone: fretwork walls, cut blocks, nothing gilded. The calenda went out through the streets of the town, with the tiliches and the flower baskets, and it runs straight into the people who live there. If Santo Domingo is solemnity, Mitla is a village wedding with three thousand years of architecture behind it.

The Quinta Real wedding — the hotel occupies the former convent of Santa Catalina de Siena — had a shamanic ceremony: copal smoke, flower crowns, huipiles, an altar on the floor. It began at half past one in the afternoon in the cloister and the party ran past nine at night. It is the most unlikely combination I have photographed: a rite with indigenous roots inside a 16th-century building. In between there were piñatas and papel picado over the courtyard in mid-afternoon, and the chapel lit up after dark.

Yes, and I have. Evelyn and Antonio married in Mitla, and months later we did their trash-the-dress session over two days: the first in the centre of Oaxaca, first thing in the morning, and the second in Mazunte on the Pacific coast, also at sunrise. They are two landscapes with nothing in common, and they fit into the same trip.

Early — earlier than most people expect. The session at Santo Domingo ran between 7:44 and 8:23 in the morning, and at that hour the forecourt is yours: no tourists, no stalls, with low light raking across the cantera stone. That is the difference between a photograph with the church in it and a photograph with the church and fifty strangers in it.

Earlier still. The next day, in Mazunte, we worked between 6:35 and 7:53 in the morning. On the Pacific the sun climbs fast and turns harsh quickly; that hour and a half is the good window, and the beach is practically empty as well.

Yes, if the place can take it. The Mitla wedding ran from about 11:30 in the morning to 2:30 in the afternoon under a high sun, and it worked because Zapotec stone and the colours of a calenda do not need soft light — strong contrast suits them. In an open garden that same schedule would be far harder.

Two of the weddings that ran into the night finished inside. At Quinta Real the first dance was just after six in the evening and the party carried on until close to nine; at the Santo Domingo wedding the first dance was at 8:42 at night. Cantera interiors and vaulted ceilings respond very well to warm light and to the cold sparklers used at both. The third, Marla and Edy's wedding at Lisianthus, was under a tent, and it paid off: the rain came at night and the party went on.

No, and I think it is worth saying plainly: I live in Guadalajara and I travel to Oaxaca when I am hired for a wedding there. I am not the local photographer who knows every corner of the state. What I do have is five complete jobs in four different parts of Oaxaca, and the habit of arriving somewhere that is not mine and making it work — which is what I also do in Bolivia, France, Belgium and Colombia.

The same way as anywhere else: without directing the scene. What changes is the preparation — arriving early, walking the place, seeing what the sun hits and when — and that is exactly what this page summarises. The advantage of not being local is that I take nothing for granted.

Choose which Oaxaca you want first. Santo Domingo, a former convent, a village in the valleys or the coast are four different weddings, with different logistics and different photographs. And do not skip the calenda: it is what keeps an Oaxaca wedding from looking like any other.