Sneaky Engagement Session at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art

Technically, you are not allowed to take photographs in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. I arrive with my smallest camera and a prayer that the docents will turn a blind eye. Katie has brought not one, not two but three outfit changes and an effervescence that is contagious. Max is as a patient as they come. He has brought no outfit changes.

We are going for a timeless NYC gritty aesthetic, something that feels straight out of an editorial magazine spread from the 90s. Somehow we manage to keep a low enough profile inside the art museum despite Katie’s showstopping strapless dress with a bow adorned on the back. It’s such a joy to walk through all these magnificent galleries. The necessity to be inconspicuous somehow lends itself to a carefree, candid joie de vivre. Outside, we quickly stop at a food truck before popping into Central Park then make our way down to Tribeca and over to Brooklyn. A thoroughly New York experience.

Wintery Engagement Photography in New York’s Central Park

For good reason, the budding flowers of spring, the lush green of summer and the vibrant foliage of fall are more popular engagement photography backdrops than a blustery winter day. But Maggie & Tyler were excited to be newly engaged and didn’t want to wait. They were also planning a New Year’s Eve wedding, so taking engagement photos in January wasn’t all that intimidating for these two. First we went to the iconic Bethesda Terrace where they bravely shed their coats for a few shots, then we walked over to Bow Bridge and documented some romance with coats on. We finished up at Tavern on The Green where we didn’t really take photos so much as down some libations to get us warm. The timeless styling of their looks reminded me of scenes of Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford in front of The Plaza in The Way We Were. The soft gray winter light truly brought out something beautiful in these two.

Dream Weaving and how it Inspires Your Wedding Photography

It was sometime late in 2019, we didn’t know it yet, but lockdown loomed right around the corner. I had been practicing yoga for almost a decade, and teaching for about half that. I had gone deep down the rabbit hole of trying to crack the elusive secrets of enlightenment. I had not succeeded. I knew it had something to do with heightened consciousness. I was reading various mystical texts and comparing notes to see where there was overlap and what it could possibly all mean. At the time I had my own studio on the outskirts of Ridgewood. I lived with the most curious view out my window there, in fact it was what sold me on the space: an iridescent gray wall, slightly lower than my eye-line, covered in ivy for half the year with a strip of sky above. Sometimes the sky was a bright blue and the wall a deep green, other times the leaves were gone and gray wall bled into gray sky. It was like a living Rothko. Sitting thus, staring out the window, a thought shot into my head like a rocket: I need to know more about lucid dreaming.

I quickly searched for a podcast or something to keep me company while I edited a wedding. Lucid dreaming is the experience and practice of being consciously aware that you are having a dream and so lucid to make choices about what to do and what experiences to have in the dream. Anyone can lucid dream. In fact we’re pretty sure everyone does, especially when we’re children. Some lucky dreamers, like my sisters, latch on to the experience and learn quite young how to walk in the dream lands. Others of us, myself included, become briefly aware before slipping immediately back into normal dreaming. Not being a natural lucid dreaming, I applied my obsessive hyper focus to the task. All of this obsession coincided quite beautifully with the start of quarantine. In the deep quiet of lockdown, while my weddings were indefinitely on hiatus, I spent my quarantine learning to fly.

The foundation of all dreamwork is intention paired with a journal. One intends to become lucid then takes obsequious notes. Intention can come in many forms: mantra, writing, repetition. Sometimes it’s as simple as a whispered prayer before bed. For me it meant hours of focused meditation and lots and lots of sleep. Prior to finding lucid dreaming I had spent some time listening to Abraham Hicks (iykyk) whose teachings on manifestation and intention I found seductive, yet questionable. She did drill into me that intention is linked to vibration, to a feeling. Dreamwork, lucid dreaming in particular, will humble you. You quickly learn the difference between saying ‘tonight I will fly in my dreams’ vs ‘tonight I will try to fly’. One has you soaring, the other has you jumping up and down repeatedly on a roof, unable to stay a loft. But more than that, your subconscious is like an ocean, and in order to swim there you need to be able to navigate the waters.

My photography, especially my personal work, has always lived in the realm of magical realism, dreaming & memory, but it wasn’t until I dove into the realm of my dreams that I realized I didn't have firm footing in the language of the subconscious. I would set an intention, and lucid or not, my dreams would respond to me, only none of it made any sense. And worse, as I intended (and often succeeded) more and more to become lucid, I started having nightmares. It became clear that there was material in my subconscious that needed to be examined and excavated before I could fly freely. I realized I needed a new approach.

I read some books on how to interpret dreams and I listened to many more podcasts. Eventually I found my teacher. A woman based on the west coast who teaches a form of dream work with roots in animism and bee shamanism. She taught a technique in which we gather in a circle, close our eyes and in the darkness, allow each other’s dreams to unfold in our mind’s eye. Your dream becomes my dream. I feel it, see it, hear it and then I mirror it back to you. It’s a form of embodied knowing that can only be taught through experience, but once known is yours forever.

I spent hours receiving and mirroring dreams, and having my own mirrored back. It’s deep and profound work that has healed me in ways I’m deeply grateful for. I also started to think about how memory, dreams and ultimately photography are really very similar. Catching dreams is like catching fish, it takes time and patience and they’re easily scared away. When you wake from a dream, you’re lucky to bring back a few complete scenes, more often you come back with fragments of images you can’t fully grasp. We think of photographs as complete memories. A good photograph has the ability to take you immediately back to a place and time, it’s like a key that unlocks door in your mind and the feeling come flood back in. But photographs are recorded in fractions of seconds. When I photograph a scene, no matter how many photos I take, all I’m able to bring back is mere slivers of what was and if I’m lucky I can try to make a little of sense of where I felt called to point the camera.

The goal of lucid dreaming is become more conscious, or perhaps we could say, more present. One of the practices given to beginners, but really to all lucid dreamers is to walk around your waking life and be curious if you’re awake or if you’re dreaming. How do you know? It’s a question that calls you into the present moment, that calls you to feel into your felt body and senses with rapt curiosity. One technique I learned was to take a meditation walk and for the duration of that walk pretend that you’re dreaming and take note of anything unusual. The idea is that when you’re dreaming later that night you might find yourself similarly questioning your environment and find yourself lucidly aware. It’s in this way that we start to walk with one foot in the conscious realm and one foot in the unconscious. A way of bridging the gap between worlds.

Weddings are liminal spaces where time feels like it stands still and for me as the photographer, the invitation is to be fully present to all of it. I’ve bring this meditation practice into my work. I walk around a wedding playfully imagining all of it might be a dream, which in many way, it is. I feel into the surreal and the symbolic from an embodied place and felt space, a deepening of my sense of knowing that goes beyond words. This is an active practice of mine. I faithfully record my dreams every morning and reflect on them throughout the day, and I walk in the waking world with one foot in the dream.

Editorial vs DocumentaryWedding Photography and why you can have both…

One of the things that makes wedding photography so fulfilling as a career is that it requires so much of me. It’s not enough just to make a great picture. I have to a be a master of documentary style moments, still life & detail, well-lit and composed portraits, not to mention perfecting the art of the group portrait (but here again the level of difficulty is raised to the extreme, it’s not one group photo perfectly composed and lit, but twenty, shot in quick succession). Everything is moving so quickly, including the light which tends to shift with every scene.

It took time to develop my skills and not all of them were photographic in nature. When I was younger and more exquisitely shy, I was content to sit back and watch the day unfold around me like a movie. I rarely wanted to interject myself. I liked to watch my couples, especially their gestures and body language. I would direct as quietly and simply as possible. Wall-flower-esque, clad in all black, I would slip between guests doing my best to disappear entirely, to become merely a set of eyes, a ninja wielding a camera instead of a sword. Directing the formal portraiture was quietly, intensely humbling. I promised my couples that once the portraits were over the schedule would be down hill. It occurs to me now, it was myself that needed reassurance. I would photograph all day in a frenzy, and then later, at home where I had more time to think, I would edit everything down, slowly watching the story coalesce.

Eventually, as my experience increased, my insecurities dropped away. I honed my photographic muscles until I didn’t have to overthink my choice of where to stand to get the best perspective, or what to say to get an awkward feeling groom to feel at ease. My yoga practice spilled over into my wedding practice. I started setting aside an hour before each wedding to meditate. I would repeat a mantra over and over again, “Spirit, move me in the direction of the bride and groom today. Move my feet, move my body, move my heart, move my mind.” It was an experiment in surrender. I gave myself over to the flow, and, trusting that the experience was part of the fabric of my being now, I let my intuition lead the way. Miracles followed. I began to find myself exactly where I was needed at the exact perfect moment, and my brain, previously awash with questions and doubts became blessedly quiet. I began to write the story of the day more clearly, and in present time.

As my focus became sharper and quicker, what began to fill in the silence were ideas. I became less of a silent observer and more of an editorial storyteller with a clear point of view: What if I tell the story from this angle? What if this part of the day is seen through the guests’ eyes? What if we shoot on this side of the room where the light is so magical? What would happen if you went and stood in front of those columns and danced for me? Maybe I could slow the traffic down behind you so it looks like you’re frozen in time? Let’s wait for a yellow cab to pass behind you to capture the ambiance of the city.

My meditations grew beyond the mantras. In the days leading up to each wedding, instead of merely fretting over the schedule and portraits lists, I began to daydream about the couple and the venue. I let ideas float around in my consciousness, envisioning how the day might unfold. Sometimes I’m lucky enough to walk the grounds of the venue in person, often I find myself walking in my imagination, feeling into what’s coming.

I grew into the role of director of grand cinematic moments when called for while easily donning my documentary, ninja mask in the quieter moments. What results is a weave, a dance between editorial and reportage styles of photography, woven out of my many years of experience and your love, then channeled via an ever mysterious alchemy through my lens.

Origins, or, the making of a fine art wedding photographer

Grandma peeling an orange, taken while I was in high school circa 2002

I’m around twelve years when my dad first hands me his camera. I had taken pictures before this, of course, but I have no memory of those. On this day, standing in the back driveway, looking through his viewfinder, I feel something essential shift inside of myself. A feeling I can only describe as ‘ah, let me just show you.’ A feeling that I could finally be understood in a way that prior to this, I didn’t know I had been missing. I had found my instrument.

I remember telling my mother immediately that I was to be a photographer. I can’t say she fully believed how monumental a moment this was for me, but she did enroll me in the first darkroom class that she could find. And, to my complete and utter frustration, art classes followed. Because in my mother’s house if I was going to do something, I was going to do it well. I spent the better part of my free time over the next ten years in the dim red glow of a darkroom.

How can I describe the miracle, witnessed over and over again, of an image emerging from nothingness onto a of piece of paper floating impatiently in a pool of developer?

I was (am) obsessed with photography. When not in the darkroom I spent hours on the floor of the library pouring over photography books. My need to understand how to see was insatiable. I thought about nothing else. These were my college years when I had that luxury, an early exposure to a life dedicated to art and light. Internships in prestigious photography galleries and lowly assistantships in the studios of my idols followed. I took on my first wedding before I even graduated with my photography degree. Can you really capture a memory in light? I needed to know.

Marlee, from my senior thesis circa 2006

I heard the siren song calling to me. Weddings were magic and they were terrifying, each one an epic playground of chaos and joy. They required me to learn how to play my instrument to the best of my ability. I needed an arsenal of techniques to rely on. I needed speed. I needed to be able to feel my way through the music of the day. It was a grueling learning process but I thrived under the onslaught of intensity. The photos were my sweet reward.

And then it all caught up to me. Because while I knew to the tip of my soul how to take a great picture, serving brides, meeting all their expectations as a young woman with no business sense, well that really took it out of me. It would be many more years before I gathered all the skills to handle the emotional weight of a wedding.

Stephanie, 2018

Somewhere in the midst of all this, my mother passed away. I was only twenty eight and I couldn’t make much sense of any of it. My life already felt a bit off track. Or rather, I had lost sight of the track entirely. I was working for an art handling company, trying to get my bearings, but mostly partying and dancing till dawn. I had sworn off weddings entirely. But when I returned to my desk after the funeral everything felt so wrong. I was overwhelmed with the knowing that I couldn’t sit at this desk any longer. There were wounds, old and new, that suddenly felt urgent to heal. With all of the energy and abandon I had previously poured into photography, I started obsessively studying spirituality. I had so many questions; I felt convinced the answers lay hidden in the secrets of enlightenment (grief dressed up as an existential crisis). It was my certification in yoga that brought me back to my calling. I wanted to dedicate my life to meditation and practice, but I needed a career that could support me. Sitting on the beach, staring out at the ocean, I thought to myself: I need to shoot weddings again. The following week I received an email from an old friend asking if I’d document her wedding. The universe was listening.

Self portrait, 2024

In the ten years since that moment on the beach I have received three yoga certifications before turning my attention to studying dreaming and archetypal symbolism such as the tarot. I don’t know what will grab my fixation next, but all of this learning and healing is fuel for my work. I’ve come to see myself as a sort of medium. I open myself to the experience of your wedding. I open myself to the feelings, to the sounds, to the music and rhythm. I open myself to the nerves and the excitement, the joy and the grief. I let myself feel all of it with you, and, through an alchemy I’ll never fully I understand, I channel those feelings into your photos. It is an honor, a blessing to serve as sacred witness for one of life’s most important rites of passage.

From bride to motherhood, and the photos that marked the way…

I first met Rachel and Ron in the heart of lockdown. They planned a tiny wedding on a terrace at the Bowery Hotel conducted over zoom as was the only way at the time. It was joyous and exuberant and oddly perfect for them. Lockdown gave a small handful of couples permission to truly lean into the unorthodox. Couples who could never have gotten away with small weddings of one or two guests truly shined. Rachel glowed.

A few years passed, Rachel was all aglow again, this time with the unmistakable beauty of a mother to be. The pregnancy path was not easy so it felt right to document the moment with photos. She and Ron came to my studio in Brooklyn. I got to hear about how their lives had changed since the wedding, how excited they were for the baby to join them. I got to witness Rachel, again, in all the glory of this rite of passage.

It was only a few months before I got to meeting baby Liv. We waited until she was out of the infancy stage when I could witness her personality start to take shape. A relationship with her mother already in bloom. My own mother passed away over a decade ago. I often think of her now. I’m in the middle of my life and it’s unclear if I too will be mother, but I wonder what her maternity time was like for her anyway. I wonder what she looked like and how she felt. I like to imagine Liv discovering these photos in twenty or thirty years. Imagining who her mother was before she knew her. Piecing together the story of herself and getting to experience this moment through her mother’s (and my) eyes.

So much about the work I do is about marking the important moments in your lives. It’s about witnessing your intimacy and allowing me to be in on the secret of it all, to live through it with you if only for a brief moment, a deep intimacy built in short bursts.

Put your feet in the water with me…

Alex told me she was very nervous to have her photo taken. She glows with a natural beauty, but, like most of my clients, considers herself camera shy. We decided to calm everyone’s nerves the best thing would be to add an engagement session to the package. This would give us a chance to get to know one another and start to build trust. We met at their home in New Jersey, a new construction that Mike and his dad did together. Then we headed to the place where they met, Asbury Park, New Jersey.

Alex had just moved to the area and new Mike’s mother who orchestrated a first meeting. She invited Mike to a family dinner without mentioning Alex was invited. Sparks flew and the rest is history. Both beach lovers, the wedding would be held at Little Egg Harbor Yacht Club, so we decided the engagement session should be similarly themed.

Kiss Your Cameras For Me.

It was the most unexpected surprise. I had traveled all the way to Turkey for a mystical dream come true - to dance five days with the Sufi dervishes. The journey there was one of those arduous treks where nothing flowed quite as smoothly as I wanted. For starters, while dragging my luggage between platforms I watched the A train pull off without me, sentencing me to a twenty minute wait in the five am sweltering heat of July, helplessly sweating into the clothes I would be forced to wear for the next twenty four hours.

I slept in fits and starts. Every time I fell asleep a baby or fellow passenger woke me violently. There was a layover in London, a train to a friend’s, a car back to the airport. Another flight. When I finally touched ground on Turkish soil, I expected relief. Friends of my host were to pick me up and drive me the last leg. I greeted them excitedly, they greeted me indifferently. I had imagined being welcomed with loving arms as an honored guest, sharing notes on how excited we were. Instead, they spoke to each other in Turkish, while I sat silently in the back so tired I could barely string a sentence together in English. Something had been lost in translation, something cultural and beyond my reach. I felt lonely and off center. As omens go, not the best of beginnings.

But of course the journey started long before that. It started two months earlier in a psilocybin ceremony in Brooklyn. It started four months before that at an ecstatic dance retreat in Brazil. It started five years ago when I dove into dreamwork and started letting my dreams be me guides. I guess it really it started ten years ago, still grieving the death of my mother, staring into the ocean on a beach in Ocean City. Where, having just completed a yoga teacher training, in a moment of absolute clarity, I decided the best way to dedicate myself to my spiritual practice was to go back to wedding photography.

What’s important to know is that this trip was not about weddings or wedding photography. I had traveled half way across the world to drop into ecstatic trance, to whirl for hours on end. I didn’t even bring a camera, not really. A friend had gifted me a little toy film camera to play with, so I brought that and two rolls of film. No one here even knew what I did for a living. No one cared. Here, your credentials were based in what kinds of healing art you study and it takes too long to explain how wedding photography qualifies.

The name we use for this ceremony is Sema. Our Sema was to last for five days and nights. The musicians would start playing, they would change every hour, but the music would never cease, and as long as two Semazans were circling, we went on. Sometimes we whirl, sometimes we walk the circle. And always there are people sitting around us in support. When we enter the space, we bow, then we kiss the ground. When we pass the musicians, we bow again.

Sema means many things, but mostly we say it means to listen. So I listened, and I did what I do best as a photographer, I watched. I can’t tell you all of what I witnessed. It’s too sacred. But one thing that caught my heart deeply: each time I watched the musicians pull their beloved instruments from their cases, and each time they put them away, they gave them a little kiss. A gesture of love, so small yet so mighty, imbuing the inanimate with life. As Semazans we bow to the musicians, as musicians we bow to our instruments.

It took me days to settle. Shedding the layers of travel and landing back into myself was a chore. Rather than the bliss I had experienced whirling in Brazil, each time I whirled, I found myself nauseous and shaky. I tried to surrender to the discomfort. I did surrender to it. Slowly I found my rhythm, I walked when I couldn’t whirl.

The energy was intense and indescribable. The music, otherworldly. I could sit and soak in it for hours. I did. Then I would retreat to my room, curl into my pajamas and gush with my roommate about how magical it all was. It was during one of these breaks that we heard a bit of a commotion. We could feel that there was something happening outside of the Sema, but it wasn’t clear what. A passerby asked if we were going to the wedding. What an odd collision of vocation and passion I felt. To be here, so far from the world I know, and suddenly feel compelled to grab my (toy) camera, kiss it and stand in sacred witness. Only in dreams have I photographed a wedding with so little notice. Only in dreams would I show up to a wedding with a toy for a camera. Only in dreams have I photographed a wedding with two brides, and two grooms. Here, where I can’t even understand the words. Yet, where nothing is lost is translation, where I know exactly what to do and where to stand. Here, photographing a wedding, I find myself completely centered and at home.