Wedding photographer at the Magnanerie de Saint-Isidore

I am a documentary photographer, and I make wedding reportages. La Magnanerie de Saint-Isidore keeps within its walls the memory of another trade, and that is what you photograph first.

Silkworms were once raised here. That industry called for vast rooms, tall and ventilated, where light could cross from wall to wall to watch over the cocoons. A century on, the cocoons are gone and the proportions remain: vaults rising well above the tables, a brightness entering from two sides, and an amplitude that sets the house apart from an ordinary bastide. Around it, the Hyères countryside, the vines, and the Îles d'Or a few kilometres away.

The plane tree avenue, at sunset

You arrive along an avenue of century-old plane trees, and that is where I take the couple late in the afternoon.

At that hour the light passes between the trunks and through the foliage, and the avenue stops being a path and becomes a sequence of alignments. Two people walking down it step into a beam, out of it, into another, and the picture recomposes itself every three steps, in silence. Earlier in the day, the same avenue offers shade, and that is already a lot.

How do you light the vaults?

With the light I compose.

By day, the tall windows are enough: the brightness crosses the room, models faces from two sides at once, and you work from three angles with the same ease. When evening comes, that volume swallows what is left of the day. I then install off-camera flashes around the room, triggered remotely, and I build an atmosphere for the space that suits it, as opposed to a single source aimed from the camera.

It is a choice I make wherever I work. The lighting in reception venues has elegance and little power. Creating your own light avoids the climb in ISO, keeps faces their fineness and colours their truth.

What does the surrounding countryside give?

Vines, silence, and that way guests have of lowering their voices when they arrive somewhere you can hear the cicadas. A reportage in a quiet place is recognisable at first glance, and the couples who choose the Magnanerie choose it, among other reasons, for that.

Is the estate difficult?

The opposite. The welcome is warm, the team professional, and present so the day goes well. That counts more than it seems: a photographer negotiating access all afternoon is somewhere else when something happens.

Lawrence Banahan, documentary wedding photographer in Hyères and on the French Riviera. La Magnanerie de Saint-Isidore, in the Hyères countryside.