They married in a small registry office in Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin. Twelve people, two witnesses, a long lunch. Lena told me later: “Celebrations tire us. We wanted to celebrate the quiet.”
So they called. No wedding planner. No florist. No coordinator. Only three days in Göreme — the two of them, and me.
Waking at four
First week of May. We met on the hotel terrace at 4:15. Ben had a thermos; Lena had a wool blanket over her shoulder. On the valley floor the thermometer read six degrees. No wind — a correct night for balloons. We drove toward the southern entrance of Love Valley, and no one spoke.
There is a particular silence to these mornings. Only the sound of the car, and once, a far-off dog. Then, as we reached the valley, the first basket burner. The Kapadokya Balloons hangar already packed up, three balloons filling one after another.
The first frame
Lena didn’t change at the hotel. She put the dress on at the valley’s edge. Sand-coloured, long, with small flowers — bought second-hand in Berlin. “I found it by accident,” she told me. The dress looked like the one her grandmother had worn in a 1974 wedding photograph.
I made the first frame at 05:07. The sky still in blue hour, the balloons just lifting, Lena’s hem in the softest wind. Ben watching from a few steps back, thermos still in hand. I liked framing them like that: three metres between them, no pose direction, only permission.
We aren’t making a “wedding photograph.” We are making two hours of two people sharing their own quiet.
From Love Valley to Uçhisar
We walked. A two-hour route — from the floor of Love Valley up to the outskirts of Uçhisar castle. Three pauses: one in a small cave-chapel, one under wild almond trees in the valley’s middle, and one on the western ridge of Uçhisar, the castle silhouette behind.
At Uçhisar we took coffee on the open terrace of Argos. The “official” part of the story ended there. The remaining 38 frames are the after of that morning: Lena slipping off her sandals in the corridor, Ben laughing at the wrong tube of shaving cream, the two of them bent over a map on the balcony.
The delivery envelope
Ten days later I sent 78 photographs — carefully selected, colour-graded. Five with detailed retouching: not the skin, the light. Lena wrote from Berlin: “We printed one large. It hangs in my father’s kitchen. Every morning I pass it and shiver and smile.”
That, I think, is the only thing a photograph needs to do.
