They're the couple who had the names of every wedding guest etched into the marble of their dinner table. The type of couple who invited 18 people on their honeymoon with them. So we wouldn't exactly expect Kanye West and Kim Kardashian to have picked a 22-year-old former shop worker from Liverpool as their official photographer. But they did. And Conor McDonnell ended up not only attending the wedding, but snapping the most liked Instagram photograph of all time.
Talking to BBC’s Newsbeat, McDonnell describes how Kimye’s people contacted him 24 hours before the event after the Annie Leibovitz plan fell through, so Connor hopped on a plane to Florence, where he proceeded to snap the wedding pictures of the most famous couple in the world right now.
McDonnell has made a bit of a name for himself on Instagram taking tour snaps of people like Ellie Goulding and Rita Ora. Kimye obviously took a liking to his page – although Connor has no idea how they found it – and the rest is history.
McDonnell is obviously bound to secrecy about the event itself, but he does explain how weird is it that his picture ended up being one of the biggest showbiz stories of the year – even if Kanye said he and his new wife spent four days getting it up to scratch. ‘It was a bit surreal but good to get the call. I didn't really have time to think about it; it was another job for me and I thought, “You've just got to focus,”' he says. ‘It's kind of hard to believe. I look at it and look at the amount of people (2.3 million) who liked it and think, 'I took that'. It's cool seeing all those numbers underneath of the people who've actually liked it.’
We have a feeling this will be one of many other high-profile commissions for McDonnell...
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.