Wedding photographers are keeping a keen eye on a law suit in the State Supreme Court of Manhattan. While the original photography fee was $4,100, the suit is for considerably more. You couldn’t begin to imagine
The New York Times reports on a law-suit taken out by a groom against a photographer. Todd J. Remis, who married Milena Grzibovska in 2003 paid H & H photographers $4,100 to shoot the wedding.
A month after the wedding reports the Times, Mr Remis, saw the photos and complained, “that the three-person crew had missed the last 15 minutes — the last dance and the bouquet toss.” The depositions says that the “color, lighting, poses, positioning” were unacceptable and “and that a video, which he had expected to record the wedding’s six hours, was only two hours long.”
H&H photographers are part of the furniture of the Bronx, and apparently in the 1940s, turned down street photographer Weegee who was looking for work, on the grounds he didn’t have a suit.
The twist in the tale is that Mr Remis is suing H&H for $48,000 so the participants can be flown back to New York and have the Wedding recreated and shot by another photographer.
And some of that cost will be incurred in flying back the former bride, Ms Grzibovska, as the couple are now divorced and she is believed to be in Latvia.
Some of the talk on the social-networks fret about the consequences for wedding photographers and the discussions have an air of disbelief. But Justice Doris Ling- Cohan had an interesting take on the relationship of the photograph to the event. Nodding to the Barbara Streisand/Robert Redford romantic movie The Way We Were, the Times quoted her as saying that, “This is a case in which it appears that the ‘misty watercolor memories’ and the ‘scattered pictures of the smiles … left behind’ at the wedding were more important than the real thing.”
For some, the perfect moment is only the perfect moment when it’s been captured by a photo. There are well-known film directors who would go to extreme lengths to get the perfect shot.
