Long Way Round

His studio is a room above a pharmacy, up a staircase with a handrail that wobbles. In the window is a gallery of couples: some in black and white, with the bride in a white dress and the groom in a suit that was never his, some in colour, with the groom in a suit that is exactly his and a bride who looks into the camera as if into a mirror.

Murat Alibekov, 66, started in 1977 with a Soviet Zorki and a tripod. He photographed his first wedding, a cousin's, in a farmyard in Kara-Buura with nine guests. By 1990 he was photographing five a week. By the 2000s, when the first digital cameras came, he said, he could finally see the pictures before he paid for them.

"A wedding photo has three jobs. The first is that the couple looks beautiful. The second is that the mother of the bride looks happy. The third is that the uncle from the other side is not in the middle."

He keeps a negative of every wedding, in labelled envelopes, in an iron cupboard. Nine thousand envelopes. Sometimes a widow comes in and asks for a print of a day forty years ago, and he finds the envelope in two minutes. Sometimes a daughter comes, with a mother's name, and sits for an hour on the wobbling chair looking at contact sheets.

I ask about the families. He shakes his head. In 1996 a bride cut her husband's family out of her album and brought him the scissors as proof. In 2008 a groom's grandmother demanded a retake of the whole ceremony because she had blinked. In 2013 a couple sued him for a photograph in which, they claimed, the groom's father looked like a dead man. He won. "He did look dead," Murat says, "he was ill, he died in the spring, and now they ask me for that picture every year."

At the end of the visit he gives me an envelope. Inside is a single contact sheet of thirty-six frames: a little girl at a table, ten times, in different poses, and then, in the last frame, only a table with a cup. "The girl did not want to be photographed. She cried. I took the cup. Her mother said it was the best one."