The photograph of your proposal that nobody will ever see

There is a set of photographs from a proposal at Torre Capo Rama that will never appear anywhere. Not on this website, not in a gallery, not in a piece about winter light on the Terrasini coast, which is a piece we would very much like to write. The couple asked for the work to stay private and that ended the discussion. We mention it because most vendors describe their privacy policy in the abstract, and the only meaningful version of such a policy is the work you are not being shown.

Our default is that nothing is published. Every commission is private unless you tell us otherwise, in writing, after you have seen the images. We do not ask on the day, when you are pleased with us and inclined to say yes to anything at all. We ask afterwards, with the actual photographs in front of you, so that you are agreeing to specific frames rather than to a principle. Permission can be limited to certain images and it can be withdrawn later. If you write and ask for something to come down, it comes down, and we do not ask you to justify it.

Surprise proposals need a stricter rule, and it is obvious once stated. One of the two people involved did not know a camera was there. They did not choose the location, the hour, or the photographer, and they certainly did not consent to being photographed at the most exposed moment of their adult life. So for a proposal, permission has to come from both of you, later, once the surprise is long over and the person who was surprised has had time to look at the images privately. A yes from the person who planned it is not a yes.

There is a limit to what any of this controls. The Valley of the Temples, Scala dei Turchi and the old harbour in Ortigia are public places with other people in them. We cannot stop a stranger raising a phone, and neither can you. What we can do is reduce the audience: choose the first hour of light rather than the last, work the quieter side of a location, and keep the kit small enough that we read as two people out walking rather than as a production. A photographer with a light stand and an assistant draws a crowd. One person with a camera does not.

Files are handled the same way. Images live on our own drives and in our own backups, not with an editing service in another country. Salvo edits every commission himself, so no third party ever holds your pictures. Galleries are password protected and the link goes to you, not to your family, because deciding who sees them is your decision and not ours to make. We also post nothing from a commission while you are still in Sicily, which sounds trivial until you consider that a location and a date, posted in real time, tells any reader exactly where you are.

If privacy matters more than usual, and for some people it matters a great deal, say so in the first message. We can work with nobody else present at all. We can leave the location out of any future description of the work. We can agree in advance that the images will never be shown to anyone, including privately to another prospective couple, which happens more often in this industry than people realise. None of these requests are unusual and none of them change the photography. They only change what happens afterwards.

Everything on /gallery is there because somebody read an agreement and signed it, months after their own ceremony, with nothing to gain from doing so. That is the only reason any image on this site exists at all. If you want to understand precisely what would and would not happen to your own photographs, tell us what worries you and we will put the answer in writing before you commit to anything.