Anna Wu is a photographer who’s been wedding-hopping TAFers weddings over the summer. Here she is with a post about the quiet side of LOL for WEEK 18 (or 33 more weeks ’til TAF!)
Imagine tafLove. It’s loud, right? Ride the Pony. Woosha woosha. Laughter. Jokes. Group cheers. Ridiculousness all around. But you can also imagine the quieter side of tafLove. Nighttime conversations. Small Group heart-to-hearts. Soul searching. The unspoken support we have for one another.
Oftentimes, we think that louder is better. We think that the louder we are, the more people will follow. And we spend a lot of energy on the obvious ways to LOL– loudly. But I challenge us to remember that love doesn’t need to be loud to be powerful.
I’ve always been kind of a quiet kid. When I first started going to TAF, my brother Albert and his friend Kevin were the showstopping cute kids. They were wacky and adorable, and this earned them plenty of love and attention. As for me, I was an observer. I learned to watch for the quiet moments through all the noise. Some of my most memorable TAF moments have been those quiet displays of Love: a personal conversation when I thought no one really cared; our “racism workshop” in JH; and countless small gestures of caring that have happened in between.
LOL is not about volume. It’s about open expression. TAF can help us develop our own ways of finding love and expressing love. TAF helped me grow from being the shy kid to being a program director and feeling like I could contribute something worthwhile. TAF also helped foster one of the most important means of silently LOLing in my “real world” life today– photography.
I photograph love for a living. As a wedding photographer, I’ve found the heart of my photographic style in the understated, the unspoken, the quiet. I look for those LOL moments in the silent moments that often go unnoticed.
You can see it in the way she looks at him and breaks out in her sly smile, a gesture of openness and surrender. It’s in the way he quietly grasps her hand, communicating his support without a single spoken word. These are some of the infinite ways ways people quietly Love out Loud every day.
Finally, I’ve been lucky enough to photograph three TAFers’ weddings this year, so I thought I’d show some of these quiet LOL moments with you. First, Jenny & Kevin’s Aliso Viejo wedding:
Margaret & Eric’s San Francisco wedding:
And finally, Erin & Nick’s Indianapolis wedding– for which we shot video, so these are the few photos we have from the night:
If you want to read more, I’d recommend:
Jenny & Kevin’s Aliso Viejo wedding
Margaret & Eric’s San Francisco wedding
How I Wanted to Live | Pursuing Passions A heartfelt post about “living the life”
Digging up Treasures | True Beginnings of Anna Wu Photography A tribute to my beginnings in photography as a kid with a camera at TAF
Anna you’re awesome. Thanks for being my ILT back in the day. Again, you’re awesome.