I’ve never been one to enter photographic contests but decided to have a go recently and was pleasantly surprised by a silver award from the WPE for Wedding Photojournalism.

This is for my image ‘Two Grandmothers’ which I’ve featured on this site before.

I noticed that they were sitting in a quiet area and wanted to document how this scene impacted me personally. Here were two ladies with a lifetime of experience, joy, sadness, taking in a beautiful wedding day with friends and family but without their partners.

I tried making a few frames to juxtapose their age with the youngsters bouncing around but that didn’t tell a story for me. I looked around and then it struck me, I spotted these empty chairs, stepped back, framed up and made the image below. Showing the two empty chairs made me think of their partners who weren’t there on this happy occasion. Were they perhaps thinking of them, perhaps remembering their own wedding days?