# The big picture: Sebastián Bruno brings an outsider’s eye to a wedding in Cardiff

The Argentine photographer spent more than a decade living in Wales and capturing community life there, including one bride’s big day.

Isolate the three figures in the middle of this photograph by Sebastián Bruno and it could be the centre spread of a wedding magazine: the bride in a tiara clutching an effusion of white flowers, her veil extending out of shot; the two glamorous bridesmaids next to her in high heels, one resting a supportive hand on the bride’s left shoulder. But then restore the context – the modest front gardens, the satellite dishes and telephone wires – and we’re in a housing estate in Cardiff in summer 2020 under a glowering grey sky. To the side a flower girl, finger in mouth, fixes the photographer (whose shadow we glimpse at the bottom alongside that of his flash) with an interrogative scowl.

Bruno had been living in Wales for a decade at this point but he shoots the scene – and others in his wonderful series  – with an outsider’s eye, picking out heightened moments in everyday settings. The series, which won the 2022 Mallorca prize for contemporary photography and was later published as a book by Ediciones Anómalas, was shot over the course of 10 years, focusing mainly on working-class urban areas around south Wales. These communities reminded Bruno of where he grew up in Argentina. “People were outside all the time and there were lots of things going on in the street,” he says approvingly of one deprived neighbourhood in Newport. At the same time, he was acutely aware of the damage wrought there by years of Tory austerity and the fallout from Brexit.

In this particular instance, he had tagged along with the official photographer at a Traveller wedding in Tremorfa, in Cardiff, and spent the day taking pictures off to the side with his medium-format camera. He’d never shot a wedding before; the other images in Ta-ra tend to be far more muted, prioritising a washed-out sense of dislocation. “At one point they wanted to get a picture in the neighbour’s front garden,” he recalls. “I took two pictures of the bride and bridesmaids, who were looking at the other photographer. Then the little girl appeared and made eye contact with me and it all fell into place.”

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