Dunwoody, Georgia · May 3, 2003
Carrie and Chris got married at Dunwoody United Methodist on a Saturday afternoon in May of 2003. I didn’t know it then, but I’d photograph their family three more times over the next fifteen years.
This is where it started.
The brief was simple. Ceremony, a little getting-ready, and an hour or so at the park afterward with just the three of us. No reception coverage. They were going to have a bigger party later, but the ceremony was for the closest forty people and that’s all they wanted in pictures. Fun and spontaneous. Not stiffly posed. We don’t need a thousand pictures of people eating.
I liked them immediately.
[image cluster: the program, the bouquet, the boutonnière — the details]
Carrie’s bouquet was a mass of peonies, peace lilies, cream roses, and hydrangea. Loose, full, unstructured — the kind of bouquet you only get when somebody tells the florist don’t make it look like a wedding bouquet. Tucked into the center was a small crystal brooch her grandmother had worn at her own wedding. Her grandfather had passed a few years before. It was the old and the borrowed. The hydrangea was the blue. The dress was the new.
Chris’s boutonnière was thistle, rose, and grape hyacinth. I’ve shot a lot of weddings since 2003. I have never seen another thistle boutonnière.
[image cluster: getting ready — Carrie, the pearls, the sisters]
Carrie wore stacks of pearls. Necklaces layered over necklaces, bracelets up the wrist, the kind of styling choice that tells you everything you need to know about a person before they’ve said a word. Her sisters were around her the whole morning — Beth the oldest, Leslie the youngest, Carrie in the middle. Beth was fussing with her own hair in the mirror and Carrie finally called her out — you’re not the star of this show, get over it — and the room broke open with laughing. They were sisters in the way only sisters are: completely close, completely unsentimental about it.
[image cluster: the grandmothers and mothers on the porch — featured image]
Three grandmothers. Two mothers. Carrie in the middle in her veil. They lined up on the porch of the church before the ceremony and the picture took itself. Nobody had coordinated their outfits — fuchsia and royal blue, hot pink and purple, a magenta jacket on the end — and the whole frame was a riot of jewel tones against the white doors and the brick. That was the wedding in one image. Big personalities, no matching, everybody wearing what they wanted.
[image cluster: ceremony — the two families]
Forty guests. Carrie’s family was loud — boisterous, talking over each other, laughing at things only they understood. Chris’s family was smaller and quieter, sitting on their side of the aisle and reacting in real time to whatever Carrie’s family was doing. You could see them deciding, in the way new in-laws decide these things, that this was going to be fine. More than fine. They were going to like these people.
Carrie is 5’10. In heels she was easily six feet. Chris had a couple of inches on her even then. When they faced each other for vows they looked like two people built to stand exactly that way.
[image cluster: Chris in the women’s bathroom]
At some point during getting-ready Chris needed a mirror and the only one available was in the women’s bathroom. He went in. I followed with the camera. He laughed when he saw me framing the shot with the Women sign clearly visible on the open door. He didn’t move.
[image cluster: the park — portraits]
Afterward we drove to a park nearby. Just the three of us. The light was getting long and the air was that specific May warmth where everything is still soft. I didn’t pose them much. I asked them to walk. To stand together. To look at each other and not at me. They laughed through most of it because they couldn’t not laugh — that was Carrie’s frequency and Chris matched it.
The pictures from that hour are still some of my favorite portraits I’ve ever made.
[closing reflection]
I photographed Carrie and Chris’s family three more times after this. I’m working under a different name now and a different focus, but the through-line is the same as it was on May 3, 2003: small weddings, people who know what they want, an hour at a park with the light getting long.
Twenty-three years later, this is still the wedding I want to show up for.
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