In Conversation with Alice Mahran

It’s the morning in Amsterdam when Alice Mahran flickers onto my screen. She smiles in the early light, her three-year-old son happily bouncing around her. I tell her that I have just come from putting my kids to bed. We laugh about the juggle and I am immediately struck by her honesty, a disarming attribute that, at the time, I credit to her Dutch upbringing. (Although, over the course of our conversation I come to understand that it is something that is inherent.) This, I think, is why she is so good at her job.

To delve into Alice Mahran’s wedding photography is to be invited into the most intimate of spaces. It is to feel as though you were somehow privy to those moments of closeness between couples and their friends and families that make weddings some of the most special rituals in which humans have been engaging for millennia. Because beyond the incredible dresses and suits, the breathtaking venues, the floral arrangements and the tablescapes, weddings are about people and connection. And in order to be lauded as one of the best wedding photographers in the world, you have to be able to balance that dichotomy in your work. To operate at the intersection of intimacy and intrusion, of chaos and calm. Alice Mahran does this with a deftness that has rendered her one of the most sought-after creatives in her field.

"When I was two and a half, my parents fled Syria and sought refuge in the Netherlands," she tells me. “For a long time, I grew up in a culture that didn’t always resonate with me, so I often found myself observing from the sidelines watching how people spoke, how they connected, how they moved through the world. Even as a child, I wasn’t drawn to following the crowd or listening to those who claimed to know the ‘right’ way. Instead, I quietly began shaping my own path, one that felt more true to who I was becoming.” Seeking an outlet for her thoughts, Alice started writing. Articulating her ideas on a WordPress site and accompanying them with little photographs of nature and of other things that, as she explains, made her feel something.