8 Years of This is Reportage: 2020 – Chelsea Cannar’s Reportage Award
Love in a time of distance
Few years will ever be as instantly recognisable as 2020. The year weddings changed shape — smaller guest lists, postponed plans, face masks and hand sanitiser becoming part of the ritual. Yet, even through the strangeness and uncertainty, love found a way.
This striking black-and-white photograph by Chelsea Cannar (UK – TiR Profile / website) captures that reality with quiet, unforgettable power. Taken during one of those early pandemic weddings, the image shows a bride and groom standing side by side at the entrance of the church — both masked, both pulling on protective gloves. The bride’s mask, delicately embroidered with the word “Mrs”, adds a bittersweet touch of normalcy to an otherwise surreal moment.
There’s tenderness here, but also resilience. The couple’s gestures — gloved hands mirroring one another — speak to the shared adaptability that defined so many weddings that year. Through the lens of documentary photography, this scene becomes more than a record of safety measures; it’s a portrait of hope under constraint, of commitment in a world that had stopped still.
Chelsea’s composition heightens the symbolism beautifully: the soft light spilling from the doorway, the blurred guests outside, the stone walls framing the couple like a threshold between isolation and connection. The contrast of texture — lace, latex, stone — reminds us how fragile and precious those human moments were when contact itself had become a risk.
It’s an image that distils everything about 2020: strangeness, strength, and the persistence of love. Time will move on, but this photograph will always take us right back to what weddings — and people — endured and overcame.
