Couples photos at the Met Museum are one of the few good answers to a New York problem: it rains, it is ninety degrees, it is February, and the park is not going to work. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a million square feet of stone, marble, gold and grey window light, and it stays the same in every season. In July I photographed Nicole and Ryan there, and this is what an hour inside the building actually looks like.
Read the Met's rules first
This is the part most people skip, so start here. The Met allows handheld personal photography in the permanent collection galleries. Flash is not allowed. Tripods, monopods and selfie sticks are not allowed. Some special exhibitions ban photography entirely, and there is signage at the entrance when that is the case. The museum also treats staged shoots, including engagement shoots, as something that needs advance approval from their Communications Department rather than something you just turn up and do.
None of that makes the building impossible to photograph in. It shapes how you photograph in it. One camera, one lens, available light, no gear on the floor, nothing that blocks a doorway or a bench. If you want a formal styled shoot with lighting and outfit changes, write to the museum first and get it in writing. If you want photographs of the two of you visiting a museum together, that is a different thing and it is the better picture anyway.
Move through it like visitors, not like a shoot
The reason museum photographs work is that there is something to do. Standing in a field being told to look at each other is hard. Standing in front of a painting you are actually interested in is not. You look up, you lean in, you say something about it, you move on. I photograph the walking and the stopping, not the posing.
With Nicole and Ryan we went the way you would go on any Saturday: in through the Great Hall, up the stairs, through the painting galleries, into the sculpture court, and out along the glass wall at the end. The rooms change character every few steps. A red gallery wall, then a doorway, then a marble room with grey daylight coming down from above. Turning a corner gives you a completely different frame without walking more than twenty feet.
The rooms worth walking
The Great Hall is the establishing shot. High domes, pale stone, people crossing in every direction. Two people standing small in that space is a picture about scale, and it is the one frame where the crowd helps rather than hurts.
The painting galleries are the opposite. They are small, warm and quiet, and the doorways between them line up into long views that make a natural frame around a couple. Look for the benches. Sitting down in front of something large is the most relaxed anyone gets all day.
The sculpture court is where the light does the work. It comes from above, soft and grey, and it falls the same way on everybody. No squinting, no harsh shadow under the eyes, nothing to fight.
The tall glass wall at the end looks straight out into Central Park. Late in the afternoon the light comes across the floor in long stripes and the trees sit outside the glass. It is the closest thing in the building to golden hour, which is a subject I have written about in more detail.
What to wear
The walls inside the Met are loud. Deep red, forest green, gold frames, patterned tile. Your clothes should be quieter than the room. Black, charcoal, cream, camel, deep navy and burgundy all sit well against that. Skip busy prints, big logos and anything neon, because the room is already doing the pattern.
Wear shoes you can walk two miles in, because you will. The rest of my clothing advice holds here too, and I wrote it out in full in what to wear for a couples session.
When to go
Weekday mornings right at opening are the quietest, and the galleries furthest from the Great Hall stay quiet the longest. Weekend afternoons are the busiest hours of the week. If you have a choice, take a Tuesday or Wednesday morning. If you do not, go anyway. A museum with people in it still photographs well as long as you are not trying to pretend they are not there.
An hour is enough. The building is large and the temptation is to cover all of it, but the photographs come from the rooms you actually slowed down in.
You can see the full set from that afternoon in Nicole and Ryan's session, and more indoor and outdoor work on my couples page. If you are thinking about a session somewhere in New York that is not the usual park bench, tell me what you have in mind and I will tell you honestly whether it will work.