Behind the camera
I'm Martina. I grew up in Prague, moved to Berlin to study literature, and somewhere along the way the camera won. I've been photographing on film for more than twenty years, and for the last nine, weddings have been the heart of my work. Film taught me to see. It is still the most honest way I know to make a photograph.
I'm happiest when I fit into the rhythm of a wedding day so completely that I almost disappear. When I'm not working, you'll usually find me swimming: in Berlin's lakes, in the sea, wherever there's water.
What shaped the way I work
Before weddings came years of portrait work. I learned to be still with someone, to wait for the expression that arrives once a person forgets the camera is there. That patience is still at the centre of how I photograph.
My training as a picture editor at the Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie sharpened something else: an eye for how images sit next to each other, and why the edit matters as much as the moment I press the shutter.
What I look for
A wedding day happens once, so I interrupt it as little as I can. I stay close.
Weddings show a side of people you rarely get to see. They are nervous, generous, funny, more themselves than on an ordinary day. I pay attention to the way they find each other in a crowd, to parents before the ceremony and friends at the edge of the room, to the small gestures that show who belongs to whom. Years later, these are the photographs people hold longest.
If the way I see feels close to how you want to remember your wedding, write and tell me what you're planning.