Crying in the club
I cry at every wedding I photograph. But not at the parts you’d think. I mean fine, I cry at those parts too. But the part I lose my shit at more than anything else is….the dance floor. Seriously, as soon as Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” comes on and people are jumping around and screaming the lyrics in each other’s faces and everyone has long since abandoned their uncomfortable heels in favor of a barefoot boogie, it’s weep o’clock for me. Thank god for my camera’s face-tracking autofocus function because I’m usually crying too much to look through the viewfinder at that point.
I think the thing that gets me the most about the dance floor is that it is purely about joy and community at that point. The stressful parts of the day are behind you, the logistics have all been navigated, the boxes have all been checked, and you get to just watch your grandfather and your best friend from college do the Electric Slide together (okay I know I said I’m a nontraditional wedding photographer but I am an unapologetic Electric Slide/Cha Cha Slide/Cupid Shuffle/etc. fan, do not come for me about this).
The dance-off was so amped even my camera’s focus couldn’t keep up, but tbh I couldn’t care less.
What if your whole wedding day felt like this?
What if instead of a day of structured traditions and rituals that don’t hold any personal meaning for you, you got to make the rules and wear whatever you want, invite whomever you want, and do whatever you want?
Those are the kinds of weddings I want to photograph.
Eden-Marcel watches their new spouse Jaq perform a dance they choreographed just for this day at a sunset elopement at White Sands National Monument, NM.
I’m primarily a queer wedding photographer (though you certainly don’t have to be queer to have me photograph your beautiful day), which means most of my wedding clients are already nontraditional. Of these already nontraditional clients, many of them also want a day that doesn’t involve the highly gendered rituals that define the mainstream wedding industry. When I have my first meeting with a potential wedding client, the first things I always ask them are:
What are you envisioning for your day?
What is important to you on this day?
What feels exciting to you about the day?
When you look at your wedding photos, what do you want to feel?
A moment of pure triumph after a wedding three entire pandemic years of obstacles in the making.
I love starting the conversation this way because I have no idea what the wedding is going to look like. I try not to come into this meeting assuming that I know anything about what the day will include. I have photographed backyard weddings, forest weddings, desert weddings, mansion party weddings (one of which began with a MURDER MYSTERY PARTY???), weddings where the entire biological family was in attendance, weddings where not a single biological family member was in attendance, weddings with metamours and queer platonic partners in comet lovers in attendance, sober weddings, second weddings, and elopements on sand dunes at the ends of the earth.
Not to mention some of the sickest non-traditional wedding fashion you can imagine.
So here’s my number one job as your wedding photographer: whatever your day looks like, when you look at your wedding photos, I want them to make you feel like I feel when I watch everyone scream along to Whitney Houston on the dance floor. Or the Fall-Out-Boy-marathon-turned-group-hug at the end of the night below.
As far as I’m concerned, the only crucial ingredients for an amazing wedding are love, community, and cuddle huddles.
And vendors who care about getting your pronouns right.
Celebrating a successful Fall Out Boy scream-a-thon.