Bruce Plotkin Photography

You might say that it all began with a certain very distinctive fragrance creeping up the stairs from the basement. You see my dad-the infamous and beloved and talented Sid Plotkin-was a wedding and portrait photographer for more than forty years in Worcester, Massachusetts, my home town. In addition to having his studio over the garage, his office and darkroom were in the basement. And while it was far from an everyday occurrence, every time he'd mix that sepia toner to make those beautiful brown-toned prints, the smell was not unlike rotten eggs. And while this may sound like a rather inauspicious manner of being drawn into the family business, something about knowing that at those key moments "magic" was happening downstairs clearly made a lasting impression. Miles travelled and years later, having spent considerable time as a magazine and advertising photographer in New York, having shot covers for the likes of Time and Us News and World Reports, the wheels have come full circle. For the last decade I've had the unique privilege of photographing hundreds of wedding celebrations, sharing in the lives and stories of countless brides and grooms at the start of their extraordinary journeys. The magic happens every weekend and my thrill is being there to record the moments when it does. As famed director Mike Nichols told Vanity Fair Magazine in talking about the making of "The Graduate", "There's nothing better than discovering, to your own astonishment, what you're meant to do. It's like falling in love".