Wedding Photographer Went Bankrupt; Photos Now In Limbo

We paid in two installments to a photography company for our wedding. About 4-5 days after our wedding, we received a message that the company went bankrupt and can no longer fulfill any upcoming wedding contracts but that they would still try to fulfill obligations (i.e. photo delivery and editing) for those weddings already done. We heard from our day-of photographer that he never sent the company the photos, and that the company has not paid him for nearly a dozen weddings. He is asking us to pay him directly to get the photos. Since we paid the company via credit card, he recommended we dispute the charges (causing an investigation that can take up to 90 days) and then can pay that credit to him. We also had a videographer who has not responded to my message inquiring about the raw footage. The company did respond to my recent inquiry with a form letter about trying to deliver all photos by the end of the month, but I know they don’t have the photos. The photographer seems nice and like he is trying to help us out, but we don’t really know him, and the situation has understandably left us wary.

I’m afraid that if we pay the photographer directly, the company could come back to us later and claim they fulfilled some parts of the contract (like planning meetings and conducting the photography and videography, even if we have not recieved the final product), and try to keep at least some of the payment, and then we will be out even more money. I don’t want to break our contract, but is it by transitive property already broken since the photographer’s contract wasn’t fulfilled?

Apparently the company may have paid the videographer half of her payment, so in theory the company already used some of our funds to pay her, so they may challenge the credit card investigation. I have no idea if she shared the video files with the company or not.

If the credit card company rules in our favor, would the photo company have any recourse to get their money back even after the 90 day credit card investigation?

The contract with the photo company gives approximate dates of file delivery, but includes caveats that the dates are only estimated, so I don’t know if that will “prove” that they broke our contract.

Not sure where to go from here. We did dispute the charges with our credit card company. Do we have to wait the full 90 days before paying the photographer directly and getting our photos? Would we even be fully safe after the 90 days?

Location: NH, USA