If you want to know what books are load-bearing for my philosophy of *gestures around broadly* then keep reading. I spent a decade as a literature and writing teacher, and before that I was a kid who read at the dinner table, under the covers, and on the bus, so love a good book recommendation. The best ones are personalized, so if you really want something personal then DM me and tell me what you’re into and I’ll hit you back with something I think you’ll like!

Close reading is the heart of the job underneath the photography and planning, by the way. When we work together, I read your love and story the way I was trained to read texts: for its themes, its motifs, the throughlines and fundamental truths running through all of it. And I help you co-author your wedding days out of what I find there.

This is why I think every couple needs a reading list, because reading books is reading the world, and often, reading yourselves, and more often than not it leads to choices that expand your outer world to match the inner one. I guess this is just my way of carrying my favorite parts of being a lit teacher into this chapter of my story.

So these are some of the books that have living places in my memory that directly impact the work I do with my couples, and each one has a question in it for you.

Be Here Now

Place: Moab, Utah; Theme: presence, stillness, and that good dirt

I feel present, and bodily connected to the earth in plenty of places, but nowhere moreso than in the desert. Sun baked sandstone and red dirt with lizard tracks inspire more actual, profound, here-ness and a sense of awe like nowhere else. Nowhere strips me down faster to that breath-slowing, everything-else-falls-away kind of attention. Be Here Now taught me to stop reaching outside the present moment and instead soften into it. Moab is where I go to practice that. The book, of course, insists I could find it anywhere; I fear that’s going to be a lifelong journey for me to make it as good anywhere as it is on the Colorado Plateau.

Want to feel it too? Come with me. I’ll show you the way the light pours down canyon walls at sunset, and maybe you’ll find you know exactly what I mean.

But maybe your place is somewhere else. Maybe it’s watching the mist settle in the forest. Maybe it’s the shoreline of your favorite body of water. That’s my question for you here: where do the two of you feel most connected, most at peace, most present?

The End of Absence

Place: The Redwoods; Theme: silence, unplugging, witnessing

This book shook me to my core when I read it because of how true and how sad it is: we don’t get true absence anymore. And that means a lot of things: we don’t get to be in absence much anymore, and we also don’t get to be truly absent anymore. I actually remember pre-cell phone, pre-social media days, and going places without a cell phone and not thinking anything of it, and having no option but to be nowhere else but here, now.

You can make absence anywhere by shutting down the devices or leaving them behind, but it’s never going to be the same as when they weren’t there and so ubiquitous to begin with. And it’s not just FOMO, it’s also a compulsive productivity thing. We always need to be doing something. Always available. Because what if. So it’s not enough to turn off the devices in our hands… we also have to reach deep in and turn something off internally, too.

Because what do we lose when we never unplug? Nothing reminds me like the trees do that stillness has always been right there, if we reach for it.

The beauty of an elopement is that you get to decide to take yourselves somewhere where your nervous system finally exhales. You get to decide if you want to have a just-the-two-of-you, totally unplugged experience somewhere so quiet it feels holy.

What do you hear when the noise is turned all the way off? What version of yourselves exist there? I want to photograph the look on your faces when you find it.

The Deserts of California

Place: The Mojave, the Eastern Sierra, Highway 395; Theme: origin, observation, land as story

The Sierras and surrounding deserts are my origin story.

California isn’t just where I fell in love with landscape, it’s where my dad fell in love with landscape before me, and this is the place he passed it on to me. From the Mojave to Mt. Shasta, from Tahoe to Yosemite, from the Redwoods to Big Sur, I grew up visiting these places the way my dad did and the facts of this place etched themselves into my bones. Fault lines, flora and fauna, desiccated lakebeds and sky islands and roadside pullouts and the smell of creosote and wind in towering pines scattered across a granite-littered ground.

The Deserts of California is a field guide that braids art, history, and reverence for things like MAPS (which I’ve been forever obsessed with) and the simple facts of the land. I loooove field guides in general, but this one feels like a magical text to a magical land.

Making beautiful images is the art of attnetion. I want to help you move slowly enough through a place to truly meet it, and I know the best way to do that is with another human being who knows the land well. Honoring what was here long before us and what will be here long after, to leave no trace except the memories we carry out with care, and feeling small amongst our corner of the cosmos is my kind of religion.

Your love has facts, and a geography, too. They may seem unglamorous but the dive bar you always go to get tipsy during the day, the inside joke that no one else gets, the drive you’ve done a hundred times, those are the story. I’d like to read yours the way I read this field guide: closely, and for the details someone else might skip.

If your love had a map, what would it look like? Can I see it?

A Guide to Middle Earth

Place: Middle Earth (New Zealand); Themes: journey, story, sacred landscape, the call

My dad started reading me The Hobbit when I was in the first grade. We finished the last pages of Return of the King when I was a freshman in high school. This was never just a story to me, it was a map for my sense of adventure, a myth I could step into.

Tolkien gave us an entire universe. Middle Earth is where I first learned that a story could be truly sacred, and that a journey and who you meet along the way, and whether or not you answer The Call will reshape you in ways you could never begin to imagine. You step onto the road…

Middle Earth is a world we can reach if we’re paying attention, that’s what I believe, at least. I see it in alpine lakes tucked up past treeline, in mist weaving in and out of desert towers and canyons, in crossing paths with any raven. I see it in long walks, liminal spaces, and I can’t help but see doorways into something larger than life pretty much wherever I go.

This world shaped mine and the way Tolkien wrote about the land taught me the land has a soul and that who you are when you leave it is not likely to be who you were when you arrived.

What stories make you ache with recognition? Every couple’s story has a genre, and some of you are unmistakably on a quest. Not saying any names, or anything.

See you out there 😉

Cosmos

Place: the sky above every stunning landscape, and zoomed in on every one of nature’s fractals; Theme: wonder, scale, inner and outer space

I first picked up my dad’s copy of Cosmos when I was a kid. I grew up flipping through these pages, feeling wonder, scope, an invitation.

Carl Sagan wrote about stars, yes, but he was really writing about our place in the universe, and the fact that we’re not separate from it, but rather woven into it, the fact that we are it… Cosmos reminds me that outer space is as much what’s above our heads as what’s inside them.

The landscapes of the mind, of relationship, the portals we pass through both in there and out here, I’m as much here for those as I am for the landscapes below our feet and before our eyes.

Whether we’re under an open sky or tucked into a canyon, I want you to feel it: that as we move through a place, we’re also crossing into something sacred and expanded internally, a place that exists outside of space and time, and a place you can return to, again and again, whenever life gets loud (I’m talking about your memories 😉

So what’s it feel like to be in your universe? I wanna photograph you standing in it.

Braiding Sweetgrass

Place: forests, gardens, open hands; Theme: reciprocity, attention, communion with the living world

This book sits at the intersection of indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and radical tenderness. The lands we love will love us back if we’re in right and reciprocal relationship with them. To be in real relationship with a place, we have to offer something back. Presence and noticing are gifts of devotion.

The year I raised a garden was the year I raised the mother within myself, and if we care for the earth, we’ll always have a mother to care for us. The year I raised a garden was the year I learned that I too, deserved light, nourishment, rest, and that with the right care and tenderness, blooming is an inevitability.

What does your love give back, to each other, to the people around you, to the ground you’re standing on? The answer tends to be all over the best days I photograph.

The Art of Gathering

Place: anywhere people choose to come together with care; Theme: intention, design, experience as meaning

So this one is pretty self-explanatory, but I’ll say it anyway: turns out, it matters how we gather, not just that we do. We’ve all been to a gathering run on autopilot. The fix is intention: decide what and who the day is for, and let that choice shape what gets written from there, even when it means breaking with convention.

This, by the way, isn’t just a cute way to talk about wedding and elopement days. A lot of us arrived at marriage without a blueprint. A lot of us arrived to our whole lives without a blueprint. We saw what our parents chose and what the people around us were choosing and for many various and often honorable reasons chose something that looked like that. Not quite on autopilot, but definitely without an embodied feeling of belonging to that plan. Maybe we grew up with one story of what it meant to make a difference, one story of what responsibility looked like, one story of what it meant to choose love and none of them held water once we learned what it meant to choose truth or to love ourselves.

We’re the authors of our own lives. This is the philosophy I bring to every story. It sounds daunting when you arrive without a blueprint until you realize you get to decide what this is really all about. You get to write it. And whatever you write becomes a mirror: every choice, from the location to who’s there to what you say, reveals what matters most to you.

Which is, by the way, the whole point of a reading list like this one. Your love is already a text, full of motifs and turning points and its own strange genre, whether or not anyone’s read it closely yet. But I’m here to do that, if you like. I’ll take the whole story you two have been writing, read it all the way down, and hand it back to you as a day only the two of you could have dreamed up.

When you’re ready. xx, Ky