Fine Art Manhattan Wedding Photographer: Where Sophistication Meets Emotion

Hailing a cab from Central Park East to Restaurant Daniel on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

I wasn’t the type of kid that dreamed of moving to New York. My older sister discovered musical theater at a young age. My mom would bring her up here from Philadelphia to see Broadway shows every so often. She dreamed of being on the stage and living in the big city. While I knew I wanted to be a photographer, New York never really factored into my imagination. I had a vague fantasy of exploring the world for National Geographic. I would pour over photographs from foreign lands and my consciousness would somehow be transported to exotic and mystical places. I couldn’t conceptualize what it would take to live that life, but I knew that photographs had power and I wanted to wield it. So until high school, Broadway was my only real exposure to the big apple. I hadn’t yet understood the myriad of dreams New York is capable of containing. She’s like a cosmic Russian doll with the dreams of multitudes nestled inside her.

Annie & Patrick sharing a special Champagne Toast at the iconic Chelsea Hotel in the Flatiron District shortly after it was remodeled.

Studying photography was absolutely a dream come true to me, I loved discovering its secrets and magic, but Philadelphia left me feeling lonely. I never really fit into the culture and I constantly had the feeling I was missing something. While New York wasn’t yet calling me, I felt an intense desire for my life to be something more. My professor sensed an innate talent in me and arranged for me to do my junior year internship at the prestigious Pace MacGill gallery on 57th and Madison streets. I was dazzled by the experience. It was like I was peeking through a door that was left cracked open to a world I never knew existed and I stood transfixed by the sights. It was the kind of classic internship that movies are made of: no pay and long hours doing all kinds of menial tasks. I would regularly spend all day running all over town dropping off prints or picking up frames or delivering expensive gifts to high end clients. I got to meet the inimitable Irving Penn on one such occasion. On another such errand I stood patiently in Duane Michals’ kitchen while he chatted amiably as he bent over his washing machine, which as it turned out, was his favorite place to sign his prints. Emmet Gowin and his wife Edith were regulars at the gallery, coming in to help catalog his archive. These were heroes, giants even to my young photographic heart. This was in the pre-iPhone era. I once spent the better part of an afternoon trying to find my way to a film lab on Little West 12th Street which all these years later still sounds like a fictional place to me. And every Monday it was my responsibility to pick up a dozen white roses at the same flower shop on Park Avenue and arrange them in a vase for reception. It felt decadent and luxurious and I wanted more of that level of excellence.

Detail of a waiter at Bemelman’s Bar the historic Carlyle Hotel on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

By the time I got back to Philadelphia for my senior year I had fully caught the bug. I started reaching out to wedding photographers immediately to see if they needed an assistant or second shooter. It was another year after I graduated before I landed a job for the semi-famous photo world darlings and identical twins Doug & Mike Starn. I moved up to Brooklyn immediately and used to ride my bike from Williamsburg to their warehouse studio in Red Hook. It was a version of New York that seems like it’s all but disappeared now. Patti Smith’s memoir ‘Just Kids’ came out just three years after I moved to Brooklyn and somehow coincided with the moment when the bottom fell out of the photography industry. It was incredibly romantic and inspiring to me to imagine Patti and Robert Mapplethorpe experiencing the New York of the 70s, true artist-bohemians living the dream. My sister never ended up singing on Broadway. Instead, she stayed in Philadelphia and pursued a career in opera. Meanwhile, I discovered a version of New York that young Carey never could have dreamed of. I found mine in the galleries, the artist studios and the warehouse spaces. I’ve lived in New York eighteen years now and I’ve still never once gone to a Broadway musical. Instead, I’ve danced till dawn at warehouses in Bushwick. I’ve partied in countless lofts and watched symphonies from skyscrapers. I’ve worked in art galleries and for photo agents and assisted on photo sets. So many doors have opened for me over the years and still, every time I get to a new one, I feel the magic. Sometimes I even close my eyes in anticipation of what otherworldly scene awaits me. Am I dreaming?

In the elevator at The Plaza Hotel on 5th Avenue on our way to the first look.

Looking back on it now, I realize what a thoroughly perfect introduction I had to this city. New York is a city that is constantly changing, a whirling vortex of energy that’s nearly impossible to keep up with. Every door you open is a window into a secret world. A dream unfolding just for you. Yet there’s also this timeless iconic style imbued throughout everything that is somehow indestructible. The layers of history are steeped into the walls. My favorite thing about Manhattan weddings is still the mysterious feeling that every room I enter holds a surprise gift. A New York story waiting to be told. I once had the distinct pleasure of photographing Andra Day while she serenaded a couple at Bemelman’s Bar at the Carlyle Hotel. The next day the couple had a baby grand piano wheeled into their penthouse room and brought in a pianist to lead guests in an after-party sing along. Another time I was photographing a wedding at The Grill. I felt a buzz of energy behind me and turned around to realize the Clintons (even Chelsea) had all arrived. I hadn’t even been told they were coming. But I remember the more quotidian occurrences just as strongly, the park employee who turned a blind eye when I took portraits in Central Park’s conservatory garden without a permit. The strangers shouting congratulations whenever they see a bride on the sidewalk.

Jazz Musician playing Trumpet at the Angel Orensanz Foundation in Manhattan’s Lower East Side

Most of my couples proudly claim they aren’t traditional, that they’re doing their wedding their own way (if you listen closely you can almost hear Frank Sinatra crooning). But after so many years of photographing here in my beloved city, I’ve started to pushback. New York has its own flavor of tradition. It might not look like the weddings our friends hold in our home towns. It might not have a huge bridal party or be in the church we grew up attending, instead it looks like dinner at a glamorous New York restaurant or historic venue, a yellow taxi cab hailed between venues, a quick walk through Central Park, or maybe a champagne toast in a SoHo loft, vows at City Hall followed by oysters at Grand Central. Even as I write this I can hear Alicia Keys anthem blaring in my head, “… concrete jungle where dreams are made of.” My job now is to document your dreams.

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.

Read more about how dreamwork led me to Turkey for a Sufi ceremony where I photographed an unexpected wedding and shaped the origins of my approach to wedding photography. The winter solstice is another liminal time for deep dreamwork and reflection.

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.

You can read more about how dreamwork informs my wedding photography and how it led me to photograph a wedding during a sacred Sufi ceremony in Turkey.