Viral Wedding Photographer: 'Detroit Is Always Full of Surprises'

Amy and Ian Hicks pose at Michigan Central Station with a tricked-out Monte Carlo and Cutlass from the rap video. (Photo by Adam Sparkes | www.breakfastwithadam.com)

"You're all Internet famous now," a Facebook friend teases Royal Oak photographer Adam Sparkes, the guy who suggested a wedding day shoot at Michigan Central Station for Amy and Ian Hicks last month. You've seen what happened next.

Amid wide media coverage of photos and a video uniting Detroit rappers with the wedding party, Sparkes, 32, reflects on how "Detroit is always full of surprises" in an interview with Indiana wedding photographer Aaron Brown in Fstoppers, a site for folks who talk about raw processors and autofocus calibration.

Adam Sparkes: "Detroit is an eclectic, diverse place, and a scene where a group of hip-hop kids and a mostly white bridal party [are] yucking it up isn't that surprising to me at all." (Facebook photo)

Between the wedding ceremony at the Colony Club in the theater district and an evening reception June 17, the couple, bridesmaids and groomsmen boarded a rented Wyandotte Millennium Trolley for a rolling photo shoot. "“There was a Tigers game that had the theater district really tied up, so the bride and groom thought it would be a fun idea to go over to the remains of Michigan Central Station," the photographer says in the article, which he describes on Facebook as "the most colorful and thoughtful story so far."

They happened upon a large group of young guys filming a video. “They had a tricked out Monte Carlo and a Cutlass and were in full music video mode,” he told me. Adam had his group take some photographs on the other side by some planter boxes, but the group making the video noticed them.

“I asked the groom if he wanted to be famous, and jokingly we yelled, ‘Hey we're going to be in your video!’ The guys were all laughing and told us to come on over, so we did.” Who wouldn’t take advantage of such a golden moment? The wedding party danced and posed with the guys and had an amazing time together in a spontaneous moment of carefree fun.

“For me, that sort of moment is very much what weekends in Corktown or Downtown Detroit are like. Detroit is an eclectic, diverse place, and a scene where a group of hip-hop kids and a mostly white bridal party [are] yucking it up isn't that surprising to me at all. I think that when the cellphone photo from the scene flew up to page one on Reddit Funny, it was because people found the scene out of place. I get why, and for the most part commenters and reporters were pretty funny and cool about what they were seeing. I was happy to not really see it get ugly, but the false premise that eventually developed was that this group of young guys crashed this wedding. I felt like the real story was more fun: a bridal party crashed a rap video, and it was a blast!”

“Detroit is always full of surprises. I know on a national level it's an odd place that gets a bad reputation. I think it's a very misunderstood place and I hope that some truth coming out of this little wedding meme will shed some light on the amazing, friendly, quirky part of Motown.”

Brown, the Indiana writer, describes the resulting photos and music video as an "Internet sensation." Sparkes, a father of two who met his wife when they worked on a college newspaper, tweets this perspective on his sudden media whirlwind this week,:

Talked to @washingtonpost @fstoppers @BuzzFeed @TODAYshow in the same day, and I'm not even dating Justin Bieber?! #westillcoming
— Adam Sparkes (@Asparkes) July 25, 2014