Summer of 2010. There were four of us who called ourselves Wedrockers: Rafa Ibáñez, Fer Juaristi, Daniel Aguilar, and me — David Josué. We were not a studio. We were not a brand. We were four friends who happened to be wedding photographers in the same country, in the same decade, and who kept finding ourselves at the same café after every convention until someone said, why don’t we teach together.
That year Gonzalo Nuñez and Pamela Barron Cobo invited us to Tabasco. They had built something rare in Villahermosa — a workshop with small rooms, handpicked attendees, and enough time between sessions for the conversations that actually matter. They asked if the four of us would come teach for two days. We said yes before we checked our calendars.
The day before — Palenque
We arrived a day early. Gonzalo, Diego, and Pamela picked us up in Villahermosa and drove us two hours south into Chiapas. None of us had been to Palenque. I remember the air changing as we got closer — heavier, greener, that particular humidity that feels less like weather and more like a presence.
There is a kind of stone at Palenque that holds the afternoon differently than any other Maya site I have photographed since. White-pale limestone, fifteen hundred years old, swallowed and spit back out by the jungle. We walked the complex like we were twelve years old again — climbing things we probably should not have climbed, pointing out roof combs to each other like amateurs, laughing when one of the stairs was steeper than expected.
Somewhere in the middle of the afternoon, Pamela said: we brought a bride. And she had. A model in a full wedding dress, walking the stone plazas with us, as if this was an ordinary Tuesday in her life. The four of us looked at each other, and without anyone saying anything we split into corners of the site and each went to work. Two portrait sets per photographer. No plan. No shot list. Just the four of us, one bride, and a thousand years of architecture that agreed to be our studio for an afternoon.
Between sets we stopped talking. That rarely happens with four photographers in one room. It happened that afternoon.
Two days in Villahermosa
The workshop itself was everything a workshop should be. Eighteen attendees. One hotel. Two days. No keynote stages, no Q&A microphones. We taught on the fly, often on the floor, usually with someone’s camera in the wrong hands while we explained why.
We ran a real bridal session inside the hotel. Night light, strobes, a ladder someone found in a maintenance closet. “Five off-camera flashes, one-sixteenth power, and an incredible sky — that is how we make this.” I said that to the group on day two. I still say it to myself when I feel the work starting to lean on gear instead of on people.
The bridal boudoir class — with Cristina Chamorro
The boudoir block was my extra class — one more afternoon I threw into the program because boudoir is the work where attendees lose their nerves first and gain their eye second. The model who posed that afternoon was Cristina Chamorro, who, a few months later, wrote “Los mejores fotógrafos de boda de todo México” for The Happening — and was generous enough to put my name on it. The lesson I kept for myself from that session: the room is built first, the lighting second, and the photo third.
On the last afternoon, a storm rolled over the city. We walked the group onto the roof of the hotel and photographed a groom getting ready against a sky that nearly cost us our light meters.
The flight home
On the way back I had the window seat. The plane cast a shadow on a cloud and for a moment I could see exactly where I had been for three days.
What stayed
The four of us — Rafa, Fer, Daniel, and me — we don’t travel as Wedrockers anymore. Life happened. Families happened. Everyone’s work got its own shape, and the collective we called Wedrockers quietly walked out the back door, the way most good things do. No announcement. No goodbye. Just, one day, we realized the last workshop had already been the last.
This page is not a promotion. There is no next workshop. There is no form to fill out. This is memory, kept the way I keep the negatives: in order, with the names of the people who were there.
Gonzalo. Pamela. Diego. Rafa. Fer. Daniel. And the bride, who never told us her name.
So we can live it twice.
— De Jota
