Desert Dreams and Egyptian Elegance, by Petar Jurica [RF Wedding of the Week]

When I started out in this industry some 30 (ahem) years ago, the wedding du jour was very photojournalistic in nature, very fly-on-the-wall in approach and mostly in black-and-white (and shot on film!). It was the style I most favored for weddings, but as the industry evolved, and brides’ tastes with it, couples started to ask for more lifestyle and editorial looks in their wedding albums, along with the look and feel of a high-fashion shoot.

All Photos © Petar Jurica

Imagine my utter exuberance, then, when destination wedding photographer Petar Jurica (whose coverage of an Indian wedding we featured last February) wrote me asking if I wanted to feature a wedding he shot this past March in Egypt and described the session as “a little bit different from a typical wedding, as there is lots of street photography and photojournalism in it.” Oh joy!

The Zagreb, Croatia-based Jurica says he was a second-year university student (1999) when he started working at a small, local newspaper as a photographer, and turned his hobby into a profession. “Somewhere along the way I started photographing weddings for my friends and saw how happy my work made them,” he says. “Creating non-traditional images of a wedding day was, at the same time, also surprisingly fulfilling for me.”

Jurica traveled all the way to Cairo for the nuptials of Radwa and Adam and documented snippets of the city and their lives in it, as well as their ceremony and reception at La Siesta Mountain resort in Ain Sukhna.

“What I love most about destination weddings is meeting new people, cultures, traditions and couples,” Jurica says. “In Egypt, the political situation was very unstable over the last few years, so I did not know what to expect, but I was blown away by the warmth of the people, even on the streets—I can’t wait to go back. And after seeing all that, I wanted to include it in the wedding, to have a broader picture; that is also part of the couple and their lives, that background from which they emerge.”

“The light in Egypt is very harsh and the wedding was in a resort in the desert,” he recounts. “There were no trees and no shade for portrait pictures for miles around. So it was a totally new situation. But at the same time, that new environment was also very inspiring and pushed me to find some new solutions and views.” For equipment, Jurica used a Canon EOS 5 Mark III with a Sigma ART 35mm lens, but he always travels with the 24mm, 50mm and 85mm lenses in his bag as well.

“We had an amazing session in the desert the day before the wedding, but on wedding day, I enjoyed the reception hour, catching candid photos of the guests,” he says. “That is often my favorite part of the wedding, as you get to wander around the guests and capture genuine emotions, smiles.”

“I am not a big fan of phrases like ‘love captured on photographs,'” Jurica says, “but I can promise you I will catch your smiles, your nervous jitters, a father’s tear in the moment you say ‘yes,’ your niece running around, your dear friends having fun—all the little things that make your wedding day so special.”

Email Jacqueline Tobin for Wedding of the Week submissions.

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