renee + lou marry at geisinger hospital

I received Renee’s email almost 24 hours after she initially sent it as I was hosting friends and not near my computer. When I opened it up and read her story, I immediately texted her to confirm it wasn’t too late for me to jump in the car and drive to Danville (one hour away from where I live). It wasn’t. It was 10:30AM and I needed to be there by 12:30. I threw my hair into a weird bun thing, got dressed, and was out the door by 11:15. Renee and her fiance Lou asked me to photograph their private ceremony that afternoon, several months ahead of their scheduled wedding down in NC, in a small room on the fourth floor of Geisinger Hospital, so both of her parents could be present, because both of her parents, in separate units on separate floors, were dying of cancer.

I kept choking on those words while I drove 80West in a daze. Not so much “cancer” or even “parent,” but the plural sense of the term; the word “both.”

Both.

I jumped into the car that day not because I particularly wanted to; it was sunny and I had planned to lay by the pool. I didn’t do it because it would be an easy session to shoot; I am an empath to the extreme, heavy with other people’s emotions sometimes so much I feel like exploding, so this actually terrified me. I jumped into that car that day because I felt a moral obligation to do this for Renee, who only met me once years ago at a wedding, but who had remembered me, and who had invited me into the most intimate, emotional, difficult time of her life: to capture her wedding ceremony in front of her dying parents.

That didn’t feel like a job, or a task. It felt like the highest honor anyone has ever asked me to do. Afterwards, when my boyfriend asked me how it went, I said, “It was so horrifically sad, I was sobbing, I felt so sick the whole time, It was my most favorite thing I ever shot, I really hope I can do more things like this.”

He immediately chuckled, completely baffled. To him, those sentences didn’t go together; they didn’t make sense. But for me, sadness isn’t a bad thing whatsoever. Pain is not something I believe should be covered up with lipstick, or avoided altogether. As I wade my way through the wedding photography industry, the family sessions, the newborns, one blatant truth keeps getting brighter and brighter, and I keep following it blindly:

I believe I have been put on this earth to witness pain, and to shine light on the faces of all that darkness.

It was my favorite thing I ever shot because it was the realest thing I ever shot. It was difficult and heart-wrenching and at times I actually felt light-headed, but not only did I not turn away, I stood right there in the middle of it, and I photographed it.

Most photographers out there are completely content with smiling faces and predictable poses. Those kinds of images make people feel happy, and safe, and for us photographers they are relatively easy to capture. Of course, everyone loves those kinds of images, myself certainly not excused. A lot of my feed is happy couples laughing - they are engaged after all, or frolicking in a field on their wedding day, and they should be happy. It’s not at all that I don’t want to photograph that stuff, it’s just that I also feel deeply moved to capture the not so pretty, the difficult, the vulnerable. Because for me, that’s where authenticity lives, and honesty, and under all of that pain, I strongly believe we can find light. Even beauty.

I guess what I’m trying to say is I want to be the photographer the stranger calls to photograph her private hospital ceremony in front of her dying parents. I want to always be the one people think of for situations like that, because they know from my work and my character that I carry the grace and the humility and the talent to capture something like that tastefully and - most importantly - with empathy.

Photographing Renee and Lou’s ceremony felt like a huge shift in my business and my heart, and I told Renee a dozen times how thankful I was for the privilege to be there, and I’d tell her a dozen more times if I could. She opened up a doorway for me I am happily stepping into. She gave me an opportunity to stand in the way of all that pain and do what I’ve always done best: sit down with it in my hands and hold it up to the light.

Thank you to everyone who welcomed me in that day, to the hospital staff who decorated the room and got flowers and pizza and who were genuinely caring and kind, Renee’s father and mother who I got to exchange some precious words with, and to Renee and Lou for trusting me with the camera that day. It truly was the greatest gift.

“…Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.

To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.”

mary oliver

in loving memory of renee’s parents, who passed away a day apart, a little over a week after this was shot.

may their families find peace in these images, for now and for a long time to come.