Jewish Wedding Photography, Southern California

 

Hello, I'm Steve Schlesinger and I am scheeping naches that you found me.  I want to take really great care of you, and your  Mispucha,  Anyway, enough of the Yiddish for now.  The Jewish religion is often very culturally diverse.  For example, the way Passover is celebrated around the world is often regionalized by different customs and rituals.  For the record, I am American reform which means I grew up with the Maxwell house Haggadah.  At one point  we got the entire service down to thirty minutes!  And then my wife's cousin got married to Peter.  Peter decided that his holiday was Passover.  He started writing his own Haggadah which took into account different cultures throughout the world.   Interesting and mind provocative stuff.   He turned it into a family togetherness event which I really did appreciate.  The ability to relate something as mundane as Passover showed me that the religion could be seen as a rigid set of rules or something that is crucial and central to our being.

I swear I will tell you about wedding photography, hang in there,  I'm working up to it.  Nearly every wedding photography website I see talks about being passionate about wedding photography.  Well, I'm passionate about singing, I've never been good at it, but I am passionate about singing.  Yes, when I was in high school and I got my first camera I was not passionate, but obsessed with photography.  It was back in the days of film and it wasn't until my parents recently remodeled their bathroom that they got rid of the fixer stains on the ground.   It was this passion that caused me to strive harder and learn more about photography.  Through the years I've had a long term enduring relationship with photography.   To be paid to do something you love is simply a mitzvah. 

 I am the offspring of a couple very over educated parents out of West L.A.  Graduates of UCLA!  My uncle headed the booster club for UCLA, and yet I went to San Diego State University?    At least I joined my dads fraternity, Alpha Epsilon Pi.    As my dad was working on his PhD  in chemistry , my mom was a math teacher in San Diego.   She worked in mostly black school a few years after the assassination of Martin Luther King.   Around this time we started seeing the migration of Vietnamese refuges and the rise in population of not only Mexican but Central American cultures. To help ease tensions the school started educating the students about the different cultures of the students they had in attendance.    They felt the best way to combat ignorance and prejudice is education.   Perhaps this was the administrators idea to help deal with a few less fights, but these programs were brought to my school, and I bought into it.  I loved the fact that America was made up of people from all over the world, from all different cultures and religions and yet we are all Americans.  We believe in principles that too many take for granted, such as freedom and democracy. 

I am passionate about people.  I am not as interested in places as I am in people and cultures.  There was a time that I  started photographing a  wedding at the bride's parent's house.   In the traditional Mexican culture the bride lives with her parents until after she is married.  Anyway, this was one of the scariest neighborhoods in central Los Angeles.  But the bride had a great job and the couple was going  to move into an upscale neighborhood in Orange County.   Dad didn't speak much English, he was a gardener.  But he was able to put his daughter through college and it was then that I recalled the exact same thing happened in my family.  My grandfather nearly starved to death in Romania as a child, and his son went to college, for many, many years.   

 I've been to just about every possible church you can imagine.  I've seen all the worlds cultures.  If you can ever get an invite to an Indian wedding, you have to see it.  It's simply amazing!  You will see things that you never seen before. 

My perspective on wedding photography comes from trying to understand and appreciate many different cultures.  I am interested in how we are similar.  I also cherish how we are different.  I can tell you that nearly every bide and groom has at least one family member they need to invite to the wedding, but wish they could leave in the car. And there are the traditions that some bridal couples wish to downplay so that they can look more mainstream American. This is kinda a universal theme.  Instead of avoiding them  we should be embracing them.

So, what do I know about Jewish weddings?  Not much other than I had one twenty years ago.   Yes, I have done quite a few Jewish weddings.  I am more than qualified to do yours.  But most importantly, I have a multi-cultural perspective that leads to different images than someone who only photographs Jewish weddings.  My photography is very family oriented.    I know the mainstream  traditions and customs, and yet I know enough to understand that you may have a few different things I haven't seen before.  I love it!  I want to learn about it.

Please look around the website and call me to talk about your wedding.  Thank you for your time!