Why there are two wedding stories
We had the wedding. We forgot to make it legal.
Our San Francisco wedding held the family, friends, food, music, and community that made the day ours. What it did not hold was a marriage license.
Months later we went to Las Vegas to finish the paperwork. The legal errand became its own small, strange, funny celebration: airport, limousine, drive-through chapel, casino, and two photographers passing the cameras back and forth while also being the people in the photographs.
The reason was practical
Vegas supplied the visual language.
The city is made of collisions: theatrical rooms and parking lots, polished surfaces and hard daylight, private nerves inside a public spectacle. We let those contradictions stay in the photographs instead of smoothing them into a conventional wedding story.
Inside the day
We photographed it from both sides of the camera.
A tripod helped. So did mirrored ceilings, reflections, and handing a camera to whoever was free. The pictures are not a performance of a perfect elopement; they are evidence of what it felt like to move through one together.
One wedding, two chapters