"Once I set up a darkroom and started printing photos, I realized I was holding time in my hands" – we talk to A-list wedding photographer John Dolan

I was always a collector. As a kid, I was obsessed with gathering fragments of the world, so baseball cards, coins, newspaper clippings, and the mastheads of newspapers fascinated me, maybe for the typefaces. I grew up outside of DC where there are all the museums of Washington and a large part of my childhood was spent visiting them. So there was something about collecting stuff from all over the world.

I had a few cousins who were into photography, so once I found the camera, when I was 15 or 16, it was the first medium that really spoke to me. It gave me this leg up because I was a terrible student and the camera was this way to gain some confidence. When you're a 15-year-old boy, you better be sporty, funny, or smart and I was none of those things.

The camera gave me a passport. It was really about collecting time and future memories, and I figured out quite quickly that the camera slices time into these little slivers. Once I set up a dark room and started printing pictures, I realized I was holding time in my hands.

I didn't realize it until many years later, I didn't shoot my first wedding until I'd been doing photography for 10 years.

I always photographed my family. I'm from a large family, so that natural kind of family documentary thing was just part of my life and then my sister got married. I watched her photographer who was just so stiff and so formal. Then my brother got married, and I was the best man. I had a small camera kept in a pocket and again, he had a very formal photographer and I was just running circles around the guy shooting from the point of view of being in the wedding.

I just remember how strange it was. We were all in tuxedos and we had never worn tuxedos in our life. So the awkwardness of it was really entertaining to me, but that was the day where I had the light bulb moment. I was in the wedding but outside the wedding, observing and participating simultaneously and that's what I realized liked about it.

Nobody else was passionate about weddings in the New York photo world, nobody even wanted to touch weddings. So I thought, that's great, here's a pasture that nobody is grazing in. I found some great friends in the early 90s and we all bonded together and created this movement to revitalize it.

I had a great mentor in college and an even more active mentor in New York for four years. I printed for a photographer named Sylvia Plachy – whose book you should have on your shelf. She's well known for being actor Adrian Brody's mother.

I was her printer for four years working from their house and she wrote the afterward to my book. I saw how a photographer lives because I was in their attic every day, printing and having lunch with them. It was a real lesson in how to live, create, parent, and be a spouse from inside a really fun, crazy house.

Yeah, we're all making it up as we go along and certainly in New York you were aligned with whoever you did an apprenticeship with. Sylvia had a kind of golden name in the photo community and is still very beloved, so I think that gave me some access when I went on my own.

I worry that that's not a thing anymore in the photo world where people work for one photographer for a bunch of years. There's a lot to learn from an older photographer.

The weddings themselves, I think I was lucky to never work for a wedding photographer. I never knew what the rules were, I had never heard the term 'shot list'. In the 90s that was not a known term and came about from some magazine or blog, so I just shot the wedding as if I was a guest.

That's a good question. The people who hired me at the beginning of my career were people who loved photography and they wanted me to make something new. They gave me permission and the trust to come to the wedding and create beautiful pictures.

It's more complicated when somebody says, 'Okay, I have all these expectations, and I want you to check all these boxes'.

I still live by the philosophy that if I please myself, my clients are going to be happy. If I try to please the client, I'll never really be sure and I'll chase my tail. I have really high standards for myself and I want to take pictures that surprise me and that I want to show my wife so she gets excited by them too.

I've certainly seen wedding photographers say that this is a service industry and we're like a hotel concierge and you have to serve your client, but I would push back against that. I think that if I deliver something magnificent, that exceeds their expectations then they're going to be even more happy. I think it's about having faith in yourself.

I did not aim for it, although I have some exquisite celebrities in the book, I don't have too many. It's just I've gotten celebrities who love photography and who particularly liked my style.

There were some of them that I've shot that may not be in the book, where I shot them for a magazine. I shot Jlo's first wedding for Install magazine but she's not in the book.

Ben Stiller's dad is in the book and Ben is a big collector of photography, and when I first met him he had an apartment full of beautiful photographs, he's really passionate about that. So, if someone's a connoisseur, they're not going to want a traditional wedding photographer at their wedding. Just knowing that he appreciated good photography gave me the confidence to just go crazy.

Same with Gwyneth Paltrow. I knew not to try to direct her or try to mess with the beauty and natural flow of that wedding. That was a wedding where I was just a little more of an observer, letting them have private time. I love to be very subtle and understated.

After the wedding is a crucial part of the process. There's a mechanism I use where I do all my own culling and I do a lot of my own editing – so that own it. I often go through the digital images on the night I get home from a wedding. I'll take a first glimpse so I can get some sleep that night!

But when I get the film back, I need to go through it in order to get that jolt of electricity, if I got the shot or not. By going through it myself, I either get positive reinforcement or a slap on the wrist for not going hard enough to get the picture. I think it's really important to go through it.

I also hand-deliver a box of 15 prints to my clients six to eight weeks after the wedding as a way of closing the circle. For me, it's very bespoke and very personalized.

The unveiling is so magnificent because people have waited a couple of months, they've gone on their honeymoon, they've come down from the high of the wedding, and then they don't know what's in the box.

They know it's not going to be the traditional pictures, it's going to be 15 curated photographs we've decided that will last forever and stand on their own as beautiful works of art.

It is a full-circle thing because I'm shooting the wedding all day long with the box in mind. I'm trying to get a sense of, If I take this picture, it'll be okay but if I take this picture, that might be a box picture – it's just pushing it a little higher.

Yeah. I shot a lot of magazine work over the years and with a magazine job you're doing that. It's the same thing – making sure you've got different things for the story.

If you have an eight-page story, you need an opener, you need a close-up, you need a wide, you need all these things. So I always think instead of having a shot list, people should almost storyboard out the wedding, that's a fun way to look at it.

Yes, funnily enough, a friend who was looking through one of the early dummies just said "That's a three-act play!". It was the simplest thing and then he just left that idea on the table and it was the thing I needed the most. I always thought about the timeline of the wedding and when I put it into three acts, I started to see.

In Act One, the characters are separate and nervous, in Act Two they come together and hold on tight, then in Act Three, all hell breaks loose.

As soon as I figured that out, the next wedding I went to, I could feel the transition from Act One to Act Two. Act three gets really crazy with the speed changes. So I'm glad you picked up on that, I hope the book has a kind of pace to it and gets wild at the end.

The first edition sold out, much quicker than the publisher expected, which was great. But the book was published mid-pandemic and the weddings I shot during the pandemic were so extraordinary and so charged. There was a kind of life-and-death element underneath a lot of the weddings, there were weddings with 12 people and multiple postponements but they were all miraculous, so I had a new batch of pictures that I loved.

Then The White House permitted me to use pictures from Naomi Biden's wedding and that seemed to me to give this a whole additional supercharged boost. We put that section in between Act Two and Act Three.

The wedding gods delivered! I had met Naomi Biden at another wedding where she was a bridesmaid and I'd done a few weddings for people she went to college with, so my name was floating around. The wedding planner was also somebody I knew so he called me at some point and said very secretly 'You have to be free in November'.

It was just such a magnificent cherry on top of my 30-year career. I'm from the Washington area so it was on my home turf and that just felt like a homecoming.

Once I got in the White House there were three days of events. The nervousness before was pretty big, but it was more of an excitement, and then once I started on Thursday night, I realized this is the one thing I'm good at. It gave me the sense to leave behind any hesitation or anxiety and just have fun.

I also respond to light, and the light was so magnificent that day. It was an amazing late autumn morning and the light was very inspiring so that helped.

It was cool because there was no press there, it was very much a family event. There was another photographer and she had her team, I mostly stayed by myself shooting very freestyle, and I had a lot of creative freedom. It was not a public political event, so it just felt like a home wedding in a really nice house.

It took me a long time to embrace digital because I was such a film native, but the first camera that really unlocked for me was the Leica M240, and now, I shoot with the Leica M10-P. It takes my older Leica M lenses and everybody thinks it's a film camera because it hasn't changed the design for like 70 years.

I'm very fluid with it because I shot Leica for years, so that's my digital, and then I shoot Rollieflex and other weird film cameras. I have a closet full of cameras and for every job, I say, who wants to come out and play this time, who's right for this job?

It was amazing that I got Sylvia as the afterward and Martha as the forward because Sylvia gave me my launch and then Martha gave me my turbo launch.

I was meeting an agent in New York and I had a little box of wedding pictures I had taken at a friend's wedding and she said, my gosh, Martha Stewart's about to start a new wedding magazine you have to show her. This was in 1995, so she said, my sister works at the magazine run-on up there and you could get in on this.

The next day, I went there and the creative director looked through the pictures and asked if I had any more, so I sent them more. The first issue came out maybe two months later and they used 20 of my pictures in the first issue!

This was 1995 so pre-internet when that first magazine came out it was so beautiful, elevated, artistic, and powerful – it took the whole industry by storm and I was lucky to be in it. So that was really my launch.

For the next five years, I worked for the magazine a bunch and it cemented me and my friends. There were three of us who were in a lot of those early issues and it goes back to Martha. I then shot her daughter's wedding, which was like a five-person wedding, so, I've shot for her for a long time and she was gracious enough to write the foreword – I couldn't believe it.

Yeah! You always have to have a personal project to show people because you never know!