About Oliver

I’m Oliver, based in Bristol, and I photograph weddings the way they actually happen.

I wanted to be a footballer. When that ran out of road I went the way my parents had — something creative — and started shooting architecture and events professionally in 2011. My first wedding was in Sicily in 2016, for close friends, and I knew within about an hour that I had found the thing I was going to do. By 2019 I was doing nothing else.

The architecture years are still the most useful training I had. They taught me to walk into a room and know immediately where the light is, where I can stand, and what the building is going to give me. Register office ceremonies are twenty minutes with no second take and a line you are not allowed to cross — you get one go, from the side, with whatever is coming through the windows. I like that.

What I am looking for is the thing nobody is performing: the reaction four seats down during a speech, the hand on a back, the moment somebody thinks they are not being watched. Almost none of my favourite frames from a set of speeches are of the person speaking.

I live in Bristol with a cockapoo called Elyza who considers herself my studio manager, I am conducting a long-running and unfinished search for the best coffee in the city, and I will photograph a twelve-guest register office wedding with the same seriousness as a three-day one.

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