Love is a Rainbow
As a professional wedding photographer, I am often put at the forefront of social issues. Since it is a passion of mine to document and photograph life, I get to experience various spheres of what it means to live, laugh, and love. Most of the time my camera is focused on weddings or family portraits, and so I have come to realise that family has no strict definition and that love is a rainbow.
Recently I heard a story from a family that deeply affected me. Another photographer had decided to turn away this family and not take their family portraits after finding out the group was a rainbow family—a LGBT family. The photographer apparently stated that they only serviced ‘traditional families’, so not ones with homosexual partners. Personally, I was shocked and saddened to hear this. As a family and wedding photographer in Canberra, I strive to capture love in all its colours.
Nuclear families are not the only groups out there, and to limit clientele based on whether or not they are heterosexual is, to me, an unjust restriction on the art of photography. Same-sex marriage, traditional marriage—it is all the same to me. When two people love each other and decide to have a family, that is a pure form of love. It is the brightest kind of emotion that is boundless and fascinating.
The look in the couples’ eyes as they gaze at one another, the way they smile when watching their children play, and the amount of acceptance they have is overwhelming. Nothing is different when it comes to photographing traditional families or rainbow families, except there is no distinct Mum and Dad. The gestures of love are still the same. It is not as if the entire dynamic of love changes just because two men or two women have found something special in one another.
When I pick up the camera, it is not my goal to narrowly focus on a single aspect of the job but many. Every family has a story. Rainbows one probably more so, because at some point the couple was probably told they could never be together or even have kids. For that reason, the emotions in same-sex photoshoots are always more vivid somehow.
I suppose the point I am trying to make is that love should be free to be expressed as it may, in all its forms. Putting up walls, creating laws, and categorising love is just unfathomable. After all, a rainbow may be comprised of different colours, but filter those hues through a crystal, and they all come out as light. Love is the same.
I do not know if it is because I believe love and emotions are boundless entities or if I am simply more liberal than others, but to me, love is love. There is it LOVE IS LOVE. When I see it in picture form at the end of the day, I do not see any differentiation between one family’s love and another. So whenever I am asked to take photographs of a rainbow family or do a same-sex marriage (I haven’t had the opportunity to do this yet, but one day I will and hopefully soon), I treat it as what it is—a celebration.
Regardless of what other photographers say and believe, this is just my opinion. I will never turn a rainbow family away, and I will show them the same respect as I do every other client. As a professional photographer, it is my duty to capture lif, develop the colours of the rainbow to show the beauty of love in every frame.
