Some editorial shoots begin with a colour palette, a Pinterest board or a particular aesthetic, but this one began with a story.
If you’ve already read The Dark Wedding Collective’s blog, The Wedding That Never Was: Reimagining Wuthering Heights As A Gothic Wedding, then you’ll know that the idea behind this editorial wasn’t to recreate Wuthering Heights or dress two people up as Catherine and Heathcliff and attempt to replicate scenes from the book.
Instead, we wanted to explore how Wuthering Heights feels. The wildness, the longing, the grief and the obsession. The complicated relationship between two people who seem unable to exist peacefully either together or apart, and the sense that the landscape itself is as much a character in the story as the people who inhabit it.
The original Dark Wedding Collective blog explores the concept behind the shoot and how an incredible team of alternative wedding suppliers took the same story and interpreted it through floristry, fashion, styling, cake, stationery and ceremony.
But as one of the photographers involved, my job was slightly different.
I had to take all of those individual elements, the location, the couple and the atmosphere we had created and work out how I wanted to tell that story through my images, while still allowing my own photography style and creative instincts to become part of it.
Because there is a huge difference between photographing something that looks beautiful and creating photographs that actually make you feel something.
I Didn’t Want To Photograph The Aesthetic Of Wuthering Heights
When people think about a Wuthering Heights inspired wedding, there are certain images that immediately come to mind. Windswept moors, dramatic dresses, dark colours, old stone buildings and two people staring intensely at one another while looking suitably tortured. And while there were certainly elements of all of those things within this editorial, I didn’t want to simply photograph the aesthetic of Wuthering Heights. I wanted to photograph the feeling behind it.
One of the things I love most about creating editorial photography is having the opportunity to explore a story beyond what something physically looks like, because the photographs I’m most drawn to are rarely the ones that are simply beautiful. I want atmosphere. I want tension. I want movement and emotion and photographs that leave you wondering what happened immediately before or after the moment you’re looking at.
With this editorial, I wanted the relationship between the couple to feel complicated rather than perfectly romantic. There needed to be connection between them, but there also needed to be distance, longing and the feeling that something remained unresolved.That meant resisting the temptation to photograph every moment in the way we traditionally expect wedding photographs to look.
Not every photograph needed them looking lovingly at one another. Not every touch needed to feel gentle. Not every moment needed to feel happy. Because this particular story was never supposed to be comfortable.
Letting The Landscape Become Part Of The Story
One of the most important parts of Wuthering Heights is the landscape, and I knew from the beginning that I didn’t want the location to simply become a pretty background behind the couple.
I wanted it to become part of the photographs.
There is something incredibly powerful about placing people within a huge landscape and allowing the environment around them to almost overwhelm the frame. Rather than constantly moving closer and making the couple the only important element of every photograph, I wanted to step backwards and allow the ruins, the open space and the sky to become part of the story we were telling.
Sometimes the couple became relatively small within the image, surrounded by the landscape and the architecture around them, while in other photographs I moved closer and focused on the smaller details and interactions between them.
That contrast was incredibly important to me because it allowed the photographs to move between isolation and intimacy.
There were moments where it felt as though these two people were completely alone in this enormous, unforgiving landscape, followed by photographs where suddenly there was nothing else in the world except the two of them.
For me, that is where the storytelling happens.
It isn’t about creating one perfect photograph and then repeating variations of it throughout the entire gallery. It’s about changing perspective, allowing the environment to influence the way you photograph and creating a collection of images that gradually build upon one another.
Creating Movement Instead Of Perfect Poses
Although editorial photography often involves more direction than documentary photography, I rarely want the people I’m photographing to look as though they’ve been carefully placed into a position and told not to move. Especially not during a shoot like this.
Wuthering Heights is far too wild, emotional and chaotic for perfectly polished posing. Instead, I wanted movement. I wanted fabric being caught by the wind, hair moving across faces, hands gripping clothing and bodies leaning towards and pulling away from one another. Rather than thinking purely about how the couple looked within each individual frame, I was thinking about what their body language was communicating and how that contributed to the story.
Sometimes I gave clear direction, while other times I created a situation or suggested a movement and allowed whatever happened next to unfold naturally. That is one of the reasons I love combining documentary and editorial approaches within my photography, even when I’m working on a carefully planned creative shoot.
I can create the environment, find the composition and give enough direction to establish the feeling I’m looking for, but then I can step back slightly and allow something unexpected to happen within it.
Those unexpected moments are often where my favourite photographs are created.
Finding My Own Version Of The Story
One of the most interesting parts of this editorial was working alongside another photographer. We were both standing in similar locations, photographing the same couple, wearing the same clothing and surrounded by exactly the same styling, and yet the photographs we created were never going to be identical.
Because photography isn’t simply about documenting what is physically standing in front of you. Every photographer notices different things. We’re drawn towards different light, different compositions, different moments and different emotions. Our own experiences, interests and creative influences affect the way we see what is happening around us, whether we consciously realise it or not.
Give ten photographers the same couple, the same location and the same brief and you’ll receive ten completely different interpretations. For me, I found myself drawn towards the darker, quieter and more emotionally complicated parts of the story.
I wanted to explore the distance between the couple just as much as their connection. I wanted the landscape to feel enormous, the ruins to feel imposing and the moments between them to feel as though they belonged to something much bigger than the single photograph I was creating.
Someone else could have stood in exactly the same place and seen something entirely different.
And that is exactly why I think creative collaborations like this are so interesting.
Creating Something That Felt Alive
There is a temptation with editorial wedding photography to make everything flawless, with every piece of fabric perfectly positioned, every strand of hair exactly where it should be and every element of the frame carefully controlled, but perfection would have felt completely wrong for this story.
Wuthering Heights isn’t neat, polished or comfortable, so I wanted the photographs to retain some of that wildness rather than trying to make everything appear conventionally beautiful. If the wind caught the dress or moved hair across a face, I wanted to work with it, and if the landscape felt empty, cold or overwhelming, I wanted that feeling to become part of the photographs rather than something I tried to hide.
The same applied to the inspiration behind the shoot. We weren’t trying to recreate scenes from Wuthering Heights or produce historically accurate versions of Catherine and Heathcliff, but instead took the emotions, themes and atmosphere behind the story and explored what they could look like when interpreted as a wedding editorial.
That gave everyone involved the freedom to bring their own creativity to the concept, which is something I think is incredibly important because inspiration should always be the beginning of an idea rather than the final destination. I never want to look at somebody else’s work and simply recreate it as closely as possible. I want to understand what drew me towards an idea in the first place, then work out what I can bring to it through my own perspective and creativity.
For me, some of the most interesting photographs exist somewhere between intention and unpredictability. I can choose the location, consider the light, direct the couple and decide how I want to compose the photograph, but I also need to leave enough room for something unexpected to happen because, more often than not, those are the moments that make an image feel alive.
Why Editorial Shoots Matter To Me
Real weddings will always be at the heart of what I do, and nothing can replicate the unpredictability, emotion and absolute chaos of photographing a genuine wedding day, but editorial shoots give me the space to experiment with ideas, push my creativity further and think more deeply about storytelling, composition and atmosphere.
Not every experiment works, and sometimes I try something only to immediately realise that it looked significantly better inside my head, but that freedom to create and occasionally get things completely wrong is part of how I continue developing as a photographer. The things I discover during editorial shoots, whether that’s a new way of using light, a different approach to movement or a better understanding of how to create atmosphere within an image, inevitably find their way back into the work I create for my couples.
Ultimately, the thing I took away from photographing this Wuthering Heights inspired editorial is the same thing that draws me towards photography in the first place. I don’t just want to create beautiful photographs, I want to create photographs that make you feel something.
Sometimes that feeling is joy, chaos or complete ridiculousness, while other times it is quieter, darker and much more difficult to explain. With this shoot, it was about longing, isolation, obsession and the complicated connection between two people who could never quite escape one another.
The incredible team behind the editorial created the world, while my job was to decide how I wanted people to see it and, perhaps more importantly, how I wanted them to feel when they did.
Ready to chat?
If you’re looking for an alternative wedding photographer who gets what you want and delivers photos you can be proud of, I’d love to hear from you.
Fill out the contact form, send me an email, or let’s chat over a coffee if you’re nearby. I’m here to help make your day feel effortless, so you can focus on what matters.
