Art News New Zealand, Winter 2022.
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Yvonne Todd and Geoffrey Heath met while doing the two-year professional-photography course at Unitec in Auckland, in 1994. While their peers wanted to do commercial work, they wanted to make art, but they ended up moonlighting as wedding photographers to make ends meet. They reminisce with Robert Leonard. 

Robert Leonard: How did you come to do wedding photography?

Yvonne Todd: Geoffrey started photographing weddings in his second year, getting jobs by word of mouth. Around 1997, we decided to do them together. We got our first job through a friend of a friend—a low-key shoot at Bastion Point. There were maybe ten guests. It felt like a Covid wedding would now. Over five years, we shot about fifty weddings, each with its own unique demands.

Geoffrey Heath: My gear was decrepit. I had a Canon AE-1 Program 35mm camera with a hefty old Metz flash that took six AA batteries. The camera was old, with mould growing in the lens, which worked like a soft-focus filter.

Yvonne Todd: I had a 35mm camera and an impressive Mamiya RZ medium-format camera. Geoffrey would say, ‘Pull out the big gun.’ Even though I had the bigger camera, people would assume he was the photographer and I was his assistant. I felt like Miss Brahms from Are You Being Served? They would always approach him to talk about camera gear.

Geoffrey Heath: I would run around as a documentary photographer, then Yvonne would come in with her medium-format camera and do these beautiful portraits.

Yvonne Todd: We did no research. We didn’t have any business training. We didn’t know what to charge. But we had to look like we knew what we were doing. Often one of us was hungover and the other had to cover.

Geoffrey Heath: As wedding photographers, we were on display. I got performance anxiety. At one reception, I told Yvonne I couldn’t do it and locked myself in the toilet. But I pulled myself together.

Yvonne Todd: Funny stuff happened. When the bride arrived by limousine, guests who were hobbyist photographers would jostle for position in front of us. Suddenly, from nowhere, some bossy cousin, with their own camera, was barking instructions at the bride.

Geoffrey Heath: We tried to present ourselves as professionals, but we were making it up as we went along. We operated from a kitchen table, but we did have standards.

Yvonne Todd: We called ourselves Absolute Images, thinking it would come up first on search lists. We had a website and advertised in wedding magazines. We were critical of other wedding photographers, especially of their cheesy and awkward shots.

Geoffrey Heath: We could have made a real go of it, if we’d been more into marketing and done wedding fairs.

What are wedding fairs?

Yvonne Todd: Trade shows for people who provide services for weddings. Couples come. You have your table, examples of your work. You chat, and hand out cards and price plans. But they’re for serious wedding photographers. We weren’t hustlers, and we were distracted, doing other jobs and study.

Geoffrey Heath: We didn’t charge like the high-end photographers. I think of all the hours we spent with clients outside of the wedding day itself that we never charged for.

Yvonne Todd: We were B list. We got jobs more successful photographers rejected. We didn’t charge anywhere near enough. At one point, we had two dollars in our bank account and they closed it without telling us. But our wedding photos have stood the test of time. I don’t cringe at seeing them now.

What did you charge?

Yvonne Todd: We had three packages. Basic, $995. Standard, $1,500, which most couples went for. And deluxe, $3,000, which no one went for. Making up the albums was a big job. They had to be thoughtful, elegant, and tell the story of the wedding. We didn’t want to give people something half assed.

What happened to the negatives?

Yvonne Todd: We offered them for a small extra charge, but few clients took us up on it. I’ve got most of them. I can’t throw them out, even though it’s been twenty years.

How do you see weddings?

Yvonne Todd: They are performances. The couple are the lead players, the wedding party is the supporting cast, and the guests are the audience. Weddings can be status symbols, displays of taste and class, but they can also reject social norms. The Civil Union Act wasn’t passed until 2004, so, when we were doing them, weddings were a straight thing. But we did multicultural and non-religious ones. We did weddings all over Auckland. Some couples had rich parents; others were paying for it themselves. Some were very modest.

Geoffrey Heath: Non-religious couples often wanted to get married in a church, because it was part of the idea for them.

Yvonne Todd: One couple had to sign up and start attending the church they wanted to get married in, but had no intention of continuing. They just wanted it in their photos. I like that level of commitment, even if it’s fraudulent.

Geoffrey Heath: People spent so much money. I could never fathom why they’d spend $50,000 and get divorced two years later. It would have been a deposit on a house and they blew it on one day. I was sad when couples we photographed broke up. I lost faith in marriage.

Yvonne Todd: I know, because everyone seemed so happy at the time. Are weddings a celebration of love or a wasteful exercise in self aggrandisement?

Did clients assume you were a couple?

Yvonne Todd: People would ask, ‘Is Geoffrey gay?’

Geoffrey Heath: At one wedding, the groom got drunk and felt me up in front of his bride, which was weird. Another groom asked me to come for a ride in his police car.

Yvonne Todd: There would always be some technical hitch. I remember photographing a couple signing the register. There was a massive candle on the table and my camera would only focus on it, not the couple. I froze.

Geoffrey Heath: I’d get so stressed that I’d go to weddings with a dry mouth and I’d have to carry a water bottle. In one hushed church wedding, my flash unit’s batteries fell out and scattered across the floor but I had to carry on like normal.

Yvonne Todd: We had to improvise. Sometimes it was raining or the sunlight was too harsh or locations wouldn’t be available and we’d have to find somewhere else. 

Geoffrey Heath: It’s stressful, because you can’t recreate these moments.

Yvonne Todd: We had to get it right. But with two 35mm cameras, plus the medium format, we had it covered. You’ve got to make people look good. That’s the main thing.

Geoffrey Heath: Now, with digital, you can preview your shots. But, back then, you couldn’t see them until the film was processed and printed. There was always anxiety before we collected the prints.

Yvonne Todd: Photoshop was around, but we didn’t use it much. I shot a bride signing the register and you could see down her bra. I Photoshopped out that one, but it was a huge rigmarole. I had to get the film scanned and work out how to do it.

Everything has to be perfect.

Yvonne Todd: In weddings, details carry immense weight and meaning. A ribbon will have to be exactly the same as the one the bride’s mother had at her wedding. My cousin, a florist in Sydney, got out of the wedding game because of stress. She couldn’t deal with micromanaging mothers of the bride stalking her. They’d leave voicemail messages at 4am with minutiae that needed to be attended to at first light.

Geoffrey Heath: Managing expectations was a big part of the job. People would casually mention that they’d like their photos to resemble Annie Leibovitz’s work for Vanity Fair.

Yvonne Todd: I would grimace inwardly, aware of her legendary big-budget shoots and legions of assistants. We didn’t have those resources. It was just us, our manual cameras, and our can-do attitude.

Geoffrey Heath: Wedding photography is hard work.

Yvonne Todd: You have to be able to photograph people and food. Emma Bass, who went through Unitec a few years before us, used to be the country’s pre-eminent wedding photographer. She did high-profile weddings, like Richie McCaw and Gemma Flynn’s. On her website she says, ‘Weddings are a massive job and incorporate most of the photographic genres: portraiture, reportage, fashion, still life, etc. It is multitasking on a huge level!’ 

Geoffrey Heath: And to be a counsellor, when there are family issues, when relatives who don’t get on have to be arranged for a group shot.

Yvonne Todd: We liked the glamorous depiction of photographers in films like Funny Face, Blow-Up, and The Eyes of Laura Mars, and in the TV show Melrose Place,with Jo Reynolds. Geoffrey and I came up with a movie idea—Double Exposure—in which we would play toxic professional photographers, doing big-budget shoots for ad campaigns. Geoffrey’s character was a sexual predator, driven by power and money. Mine was a substance abuser, broken by the demands of her perfectionism, recovering from a breakdown at her parents’ place, a brick-and-tile bungalow in Glenfield. We discussed an opening scene, featuring tracking shots, with Geoffrey flying over Auckland Harbour Bridge in a helicopter while I drove over it in a sports car. Double Exposure was us on steroids. 

According to Emma Bass, wedding photography is considered the ‘lowest rung’ on the photography ladder. So you were lowly wedding photographers aspiring both to be high-end advertising photographers in your fantasies and to be artists in reality.

Geoffrey Heath: Double Exposurewas our escapist fantasy. But we had an alternative scenario, where my character turned up late for a wedding in a clapped-out car, in stubbies and jandals, smelling of booze, cigarettes, and BO, totally unprepared.

Yvonne Todd: We also talked about making a TV informercial for a self-help programme called PhotoTherapy, where we were flaky new-age gurus promoting selfies—before they were a thing—as a path to self fulfilment. 

What were the wedding trends of the late 1990s? 

Yvonne Todd: Funky, bright colours. Lots of gerberas. In photos, brides and grooms would face each other, bend at the waist, and kiss like cuckoo-clock automata.

Geoffrey Heath: And jumping shots. The groom and the guys would jump, and we’d have to shoot them in mid-air. Or the groom would hold the bouquet and pull some camp pose. Also, wedding-party shots with everyone in sunglasses. Rose-petal shots were often requested.

Yvonne Todd: We’d have to set up an elaborate shot, with all the guests in a semicircle and the bride and groom in the middle performing some ritual with rose petals flying around.

Geoffrey Heath: We had to herd and coax our subjects, while juggling cameras with manual light meters. We had to be people people and technical people. Afterwards, we’d have intense debriefs over a lot of wine to let off steam.

Yvonne Todd: People were often quite stiff. Men would be uncomfortable in their suits. If you want good photos, you can’t have people looking awkward. Geoffrey was good at directing. He would encourage people, saying, ‘Oh my God, this looks amazing.’ Then I’d say, ‘Gosh, you look great. Let’s do this.’ 

Geoffrey Heath: We’d cull out the shots that we couldn’t give to clients, but I’d love to shoot a wedding with everyone looking awkward, before they relax, because that’s the truth. But no one wants photos of themselves like that.

As wedding photographers, you have to fulfil other people’s ideas of what a tasteful artistic photo is.

Yvonne Todd: There were taste misalignments. In a briefing, clients might show us an example of a photo they liked, and it would be a canvas print with a purple sunset. We’d just say, ‘We don’t do that.’

Geoffrey Heath: We learned there was no accounting for taste. We’d steer clients towards what we were able to give them.

Yvonne Todd: Some clients valued the photography, but for others it was just a tool to document the day. Wedding photographers had more status in the 1990s. Now, with digital cameras and zoom lenses, it’s easy. Photographers just give clients a CD of images or email them. Video is used a lot, and sometimes they just print stills from videos. Also, the documentary approach is favoured—it’s seen as more contemporary—rather than having people pose formally. Today, those lavish albums seem antiquated. 

How did you reconcile being wedding photographers with being artists?

Yvonne Todd: As artists, we were worried about being outed as wedding photographers. But it didn’t matter, because it was so oddball.

Geoffrey Heath: It never worked against us. I showed my portrait series Spare Room at Rm, back when it was above Real Groovy Records in Queen Street, in 1999. The work was a mix of documentary informality and studio formality, with unsmiling subjects presented front on, in their homes. A couple saw the show and booked me for a wedding, wanting that specific look. They were art savvy—they had their wedding at Artspace. That’s one time when my art photography and my wedding photography crossed over.

Was there a voyeuristic element?

Geoffrey Heath: We’re voyeurs, and weddings are the perfect occasion to watch people. We were super nosy.

Yvonne Todd: Occasionally, the bride would be getting ready at her parents’ place, and there would be interesting knick-knacks on the mantelpiece. I’d steal a couple of shots, pretending I was testing the camera. We’d also shoot the family pets. 

Did making wedding photographs inform the way you made your own work?

Geoffrey Heath: For me, the main connection was in my interest in domestic environments. When we shot weddings, we’d end up in people’s homes, seeing how they lived, how they decorated, their furniture, their taste. That spilled over into my art, where I shoot people in their homes. My photos are like constructed snapshots.

Yvonne Todd: In my work, the staging—all the behind-the-scenes preparation to get the shot—is crucial. So wedding photography didn’t seem like a sidestep. In terms of craft, it was a great way to challenge myself.

Your joint show Sunnynook at Fiat Lux back in 1999 was like the antithesis or the unconscious of your wedding work.

Yvonne Todd: We made shots of unpretentious, mildly grim domestic scenes around the North Shore. There were no people, just traces of them. There was no glamour. The work had a 35mm-snapshot aesthetic. We showed the images as laminated laser copies. It was a welcome reprieve from weddings. 

Geoffrey Heath: I loved your shot of the abandoned spa pool. I remember doing shots of a turps bottle in a garage window, a bedside lamp leaning against a bedhead, and a faux-marble table with glare from the flash.

Yvonne Todd: We called it Sunnynook because we’re both from the North Shore.

Geoffrey Heath: Sunnynook is a white, white-bread neighbourhood on the Shore. When I was a born-again Christian in the 1980s, I got baptised in an indoor swimming pool in a house there. One of my best friends, a prostitute at the time, attended in leopard-skin tights. When I came out of the water, they took a photo of me. My hair was slicked back and I had a moustache, so I looked like an Italian waiter.

Yvonne, your series Asthma and Eczema (2001) included three images of faceless, looming, back-lit, zombie brides—like wedding photographs gone wrong. 

Yvonne Todd: Asthma and Eczema was a mélange of wedding photography, Virginia Andrews book-cover art, and sympathy cards from Paper Plus, with a North Shore spin. The brides were shot at a North Shore cemetery, on a hill. They’re in synthetic lace op-shop wedding dresses that I dyed pastel colours, but they appear as silhouettes. I was low, with the camera angled up. I wanted viewers to feel like they were lying in a grave at the brides’ feet. Geoffrey and I were still shooting weddings around that time. Our last one was early 2002.

You got married in 2008.

Yvonne Todd: I had a big wedding with lots of time to prepare. Now, if I were to get married, it would be small, low key. I managed the whole wedding. I wasn’t a bridezilla. Actually, I don’t think that term is fair. If you want things done well, that doesn’t make you an unreasonable person.

My idea of a bridezilla is someone who thinks the groom is just a detail, about as important as the flowers or the gilding on the invitation.

Geoffrey Heath: Maybe it’s changed, but, when we were doing it, it was all about the bride. It was the bride’s day.

Yvonne Todd: You hear of women who have known the wedding dress they’ve wanted since they were ten. They know exactly what they want. 

What did you wear?

Yvonne Todd: Valentino. It’s on my Instagram. I bought my wedding ring from a shop in the Albany mall that sold cheap bling. It cost $14.50 and left a green tinge on my finger. Our celebrant asked, ‘What song do you want when you walk down the aisle?’ I said ‘We’ve Only Just Begun’ by The Carpenters, ‘because Karen Carpenter died of anorexia’. I said it too gleefully and she just looked at me. 

What songs were popular at the weddings you photographed?

Yvonne Todd: Shania Twain’s ‘From This Moment’ and Celine Dion’s Titanic theme ‘My Heart Will Go On’ were ubiquitous.

Who photographed your wedding?

Yvonne Todd: Evotia Tamua did documentary-style coverage on the day. And Geoffrey did pool-side shots at home the day before. It was important to get the pool-cleaning gear in the background.

Geoffrey Heath: I was channelling Helmut Newton. They were shot on film, medium format. It was my wedding present.

You look so glamorous.

Yvonne Todd: I’m a bit older now. I’ve had three children. But, yes, I was hamming it up.

Geoffrey, if you were getting married, what look would you go for?

Geoffrey Heath: It would be outside, in a natural environment—a beach or a park, under a large tree—not in a church. Just friends and family. Very relaxed. I’d wear an open-necked pirate shirt, maybe a gold medallion. But my partner has already been married twice and doesn’t want to get married again, so it’s not looking likely.