KENZIE KATE

Category: weddings

  • cassie + lyn / destination wedding/ tulum, Mexico

    they’re married, they’re married, they’re married!

    most weddings feel like a blur, and even though this celebration spanned a few days, it was a blur just the same. a blur filled with thick humidity, endless pina coladas, new friends who quickly felt like old, social justice talks with lots of smartey pants folks, poems, happy tears, AAAAAHS!!!, tequila sponsored dancing, unicorn sponsored swimming, and a whole lot of sunburns. having a four day celebration meant that lyn and cass got to spend time with each of their guests, and the whole thing felt like a very collective celebration. this colorado couple curated an impressive weekend at dreams in tulum that was simple, thoughtful, balanced, and gorgeous. i never wanted to leave.

    six years later and i am still nervous before every wedding i photograph (i hope that never ever changes) but this made me eeeexxxxxxtra nervous–not only because cass is an unbelievably talented wedding photographer herself, but because a “getting on my radar” email two years ago from a name i didn’t recognize has since turned into a supremely significant friendship with two people i would consider family. cassie is frank, strong-willed, quick-witted, brilliantly creative #ladyboss with a contagious, commanding presence, a mind full of ideas, and a stream of constant affirmations for those around her. lyn is a nurturing, thoughtful, hilarious, open, brilliant writer and poet that that without fail brings a distinctly comforting presence and balance to any situation ive seen her in. together they are generous, hilarious, perfectly balanced, and love the people (and dogs :)))) around them so, so well. their relationship teaches me so much about how love and commitment is a constant, difficult but rewarding choice. they are constantly choosing one another. their wedding was such a testament to that. they spent separate mornings with their ~people~, were visibly more relaxed the second the rejoined in the afternoon, practiced their teary, beautiful vows with one another before the chaos of the day really picked up, were married in front of the ocean surrounded by 40 loved ones, had beautiful poems spoken over them (i included some below!), and daaaaaanced until everyone was drunk enough to sneak past security and jump into the pool in full wedding gear. i’m so so grateful to know such beautiful humans and to be trusted to partake and document this beautiful part of their story.

    It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living.
    I want to know what you ache for
    and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.

    It doesn’t interest me how old you are.
    I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love
    for your dream
    for the adventure of being alive.

    It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon…
    I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow if you have been opened by life’s betrayals
    or have become shrivelled and closed
    from fear of further pain.

    I want to know if you can sit with pain mine or your own
    without moving to hide it
    or fade it
    or fix it.

    I want to know if you can be with joy
    mine or your own
    if you can dance with wildness
    and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us
    to be careful

    to be realistic
    to remember the limitations of being human.

    It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me is true.

    I want to know if you can disappoint another

    to be true to yourself.
    If you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul.
    If you can be faithless
    and therefore trustworthy.

    I want to know if you can see Beauty even when it is not pretty every day.

    And if you can source your own life from its presence.

    I want to know if you can live with failure yours and mine
    and still stand at the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, “Yes.”

    It doesn’t interest me
    to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up
    after the night of grief and despair
    weary and bruised to the bone
    and do what needs to be done
    to feed the children.

    It doesn’t interest me who you know or how you came to be here.
    I want to know if you will stand in the centre of the fire
    with me
    and not shrink back.

    It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom you have studied.
    I want to know what sustains you
    from the inside
    when all else falls away.

    I want to know if you can be alone with yourself
    and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.

    (emily ambrose)

    “You know that place between sleep + awake;
    that place where you can still remember dreaming?
    That’s where I’ll always love you.
    That’s where I’ll be waiting.”

    (JM Berry)

    I am not the first person you loved.
    You are not the first person I looked at with a mouthful of forevers. We have both known loss like the sharp edges of a knife.
    We have both lived with lips more scar tissue than skin.
    Our love came unannounced in the middle of the night.
    Our love came when we’d given upon asking love to come.
    I think that has to be part of its miracle.
    This is how we heal. I will kiss you like forgiveness.
    You will hold me like I’m hope.
    Our arms will bandage and we will press promises between us like flowers in a book.
    I will write sonnets to the salt of sweat on your skin.
    I will write novels to the scar of your nose.
    I will write a dictionary of all the words I have used trying to describe the way it feels to have finally, finally found you.
    And I will not be afraid of your scars.
    I know sometimes it’s still hard to let me see you in all your cracked perfection, but please know: whether it’s the days you burn more brilliant than the sun or the nights you collapse into my lap your body broken into a thousand questions, you are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
    I will love you when you are a still day.
    I will love you when you are a hurricane.

    (clementine von radics)

     

    “Love is many things
    and sometimes we are never really sure if it even exists,
    But all I know is that if you were
    To show me her soul in a photograph I wouldn’t even ask to see the others.”

    (christopher poindexter)

    cheers you two, xo

  • Newport Beach Boat Wedding

    some photographs from a wedding i assisted grace baeck with back in august!

  • 2015 Recap // Los Angeles + Destination Wedding Photographer

    2010  //  2011 //  2012 // 2013 // 2014
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    a few years ago, i became really insecure about the extent to which i was photographing the world around me. i became really conscious of the space i was taking up, and really terrified of stepping out of line and unintentionally misrepresenting a person, situation, or emotion. was my photography exploitive? was it dishonest? was i sugarcoating? we are photographically saturated generation. was i contributing to that, and was i missing out on living my own life? am i destroying something sacred by selfishly trying to freeze it into prosperity? i decided to stop photographing my ‘personal life’ (what does that phrase mean, anyway?), sharing (or “trying too hard” with) whatever i deemed personal, and saved art for solely business purposes. i do not recommend this.

    i continued to photograph my life, but I still felt petty, and i still felt this misplaced, deep, internal guilt for doing it. then i wrote my senior thesis. contextually, my thesis was about the connection between modesty culture and eating disorders, but a lot of it was centered on the idea of space as social power. i ended up researching and writing a lot about food. anthropologically, food serves as a social power–whom a society values, it feeds first, and it feeds well. there are dozens of reasons the act of researching, mulling over, writing, and presenting my thesis felt deeply significant to me, but mostly because it caused me to examine the ways that i have internalized this ‘requirement’ to take up as little space in the world as possible (physically, emotionally, spiritually, and mentally). as i began to unravel the ways that this twisted mindset manifests itself in all aspects of my life, i started to see how my guilt for wanting to photograph the seemingly mundane days of my life was a manifestation of disallowing myself to take up space in my own life and the world around me.

    the reason it can be dangerous to “save” photographing for only certain events–like weddings, or christmas cards or graduation–is that, eventually, we begin to ascribe a particular significance to these milestones. we live in a world where certain life events are deemed as “milestones”, and we are taught to aspire to them, anticipate them, spend money on them, speak highly of them, file them in our minds as a BIIIIG IMPORTANT MOMENT. these are the things that are photographed and these are the smiling, posed pictures that hang on our walls. you’re not supposed to photograph the salad you ate after you were the first one to say “i love you” so that you can remember that day forever. you don’t commemorate rehab in pictures. you don’t photograph the last payment you make to get out of debt, or the months of training for that marathon. people don’t really photographs heartbreaks. aren’t those milestones just as significant?

    by societal standards, this year has been filled with a lot of milestones for me. they were very big and important, yes, but what stick out to me the most are a lot of the surrounding details.  a bride two years ago told me one of her favorite photographs from their wedding was of a pair of swimtrunks drying on a heater outside her groom’s cabin. this is a very common response, i’ve found. some of my favorite photographs i took this year were of the mundane details of living with eight girls in our big, beloved house just before we graduated. i don’t think we have a graduation photo of all of us together, smiling–but we do have a picture of us crying while watching an iphone video. that moment stands out as a milestone in my year. i have a picture on my phone of myself crying this past august, and while it’s not my favorite, i took it because i was going through a really hard time and i felt like i needed to acknowledge that moment in my life–just like i acknowledge when i find the shadow on a wall really pretty, or place a newly married couple in a really cute pose.

    i’m saying all this because you don’t really know much, and i don’t really know much, and that’s okay. i don’t know why we frame things in a certain way or whether or not we are sugarcoating our lives, but it’s okay. i don’t know how to reconcile joy and pain, or how to uplift one without feeling like i’m ignoring the other. i don’t know how to be honest or brave a lot of the time. i don’t know how to translate the things i see to the world, and i don’t know how my work is received by other people. i don’t know if you came here to look at black and white baby pictures (OKAY MEEEE) and are annoyed that you are reading very confusing, vague, haphazardly written paragraphs by me. i don’t know why i feel like these are the words i want to share right now, or if i will even agree with these sentiments a year from now.

    when i talk about my job, i say that i deem it my responsibility to show up, to tell the truth, and translate what i see in the big and in the small into something that will serve as a reminder for years to come. i’m trying to do the same in my own life. whether these pictures represent milestones for you, milestones in our society, or nothing at all, these are some of the moments that stick out to me when i think of 2015. very thankful for it all.




    these recap posts are always my favorite. thank you for looking at the pictures i take. if you are in them, i know they mean much different things for you than they do for me. thank you thank you thank you for trusting me, it’s not an honor i take lightly. if you have absolutely no context for who or what is going on in a photograph, i acknowledge and hope that they mean significantly different things for you than they do for me. context and perspective change how we see things, and what emotions are stirred, and that is a very important, natural, and good thing.
    thank you for participating, whether it be on the other side of the camera, or the other side of this screen. thank you for allowing me to participate.

    particular shoutouts to the people of chiang mai, portland, chicago, denver, santa barbara, san francisco, los angeles (okay all of california), calgary, and salt lake for making this year exxxxtra #dope

    wishing you a coming year full of documenting and celebrating the shitty, the fantastic and the boring parts of your life in whatever way you want, to whatever extent you feel is right!!!

    happy 2016!

    (i still take–and like!–“stiff, posed, smiling” cliche pictures. just for the record mom)