Desert Tango

This past holiday season, I was hired to photograph a Navajo wedding by some friends of mine. This was the first time I’ve witnessed a traditional wedding. Brian and Dionne Tandy were married right here in Gallup, New Mexico at a relatives house.

What I found interesting was that, while the many of the rituals and ceremonial stuff  were based on Navajo wedding traditions, there were elements of a contemporary wedding as well. This manifested itself to me in the cake cutting. Earlier in the day during the heart of the wedding ceremony, Brian and Dionne had fed each other blue corn mush. Later they cut cut the cake fed it to each other as well.

It was a beautiful, relaxed and open ceremony full of  Navajo traditions I was unfamiliar with, but in the end it sort of amounted to the same thing; two families unified by the act of marriage.

To see a more complete gallery of images, please go to my website.

I recently travelled to the Dubuque, Iowa area to photograph a wedding for my friend Bekah Porter and her now-husband Chris Sandy. Strangely enough I was there over 10 years ago for my uncles wedding, and upon my return I remembered how beautiful of a place it was. Gently rolling hills, rivers, a waterfall and the lush Iowa countryside made for a perfect setting.

Admittedly, this is the first large wedding I’ve shot in over two years. In the pre-digital days, I used to shoot quite a few, but my work in the world of photojournalism took me away from that. I now see that my style and method are well suited to doing photojournalism style weddings and I’ve decided to make the jump back into things.

For this post I’m only including a couple of images, but if you’d like to see a larger gallery of images from the wedding, please go here.