About Mark Darrough

I shoot with a fine art approach founded on a 10-year career in journalism, which has taken me to Rwanda, Liberia, and to my home state, North Carolina. I live with my beautiful wife (one of my talented second shooters) and our two English shepherds in a bungalow house near downtown Wilmington, between the Cape Fear River and the Intracoastal Waterway.

In the spring of 2022 I was honored by the NC Press Assoc. with my third consecutive Photo Essay of the Year. Seven years before, I spent a week with Erich McVey, one of the world’s leading wedding photographers, to study his fine art film approach at a workshop on the northern California coast. Ever since, I’ve used my journalistic work – always endeavoring to capture Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment – to fuel my work photographing weddings, engagement photos, and family portraits.

Capturing human emotions at their truest form is my life’s work. Whereas my journalistic assignments allow me to document people straining in conflict – like those who stayed in Kharkiv last spring, withstanding a Russian bombardment – when I shoot a wedding, I turn my lens toward the natural joy created when two sets of families and their closest friends come together to celebrate a marriage. There is nothing better than receiving the privilege of documenting everything so beautiful about such a day – a father glancing up at the bride for the first time before burying his head in his hands, a mother snapping up her daughter’s dress, the fellas raising their glasses of bourbon before the ceremony.

As a student of both Cartier-Bresson and McVey, I’m passionate about delivering a collection of photographs to the bride and groom that they and their families will always cherish.

Pictured: At Erich McVey’s Fine Art Wedding Workshop in Elk, California, 2015.