Ellie & Matt
Two days in the Italian Alps

Ellie and Matt came to me with a vision that was clear on feeling and vague on logistics, which is exactly the right starting point. They wanted to be deep in the mountains. They wanted to feel small in the landscape. They wanted to come home with photographs that looked nothing like a wedding. Two months was all we had to build it.

Day one started at a lake that earns its reputation before 8am. The water at that hour is a color that doesn’t have a name yet. Ellie walked in barefoot. Matt watched her like he was still surprised she’d agreed to do all of this. We made photographs and then kept moving.

The morning took us deeper into the mountains, through valleys where you can hear the difference between silence and true quiet. We stopped whenever something demanded it. There was no rush because I had built the itinerary with room for the unexpected, and the Dolomites always deliver unexpected things.

By evening, we were at the high pass. The rain had been threatening since mid-afternoon and arrived on cue during the ceremony, which is the Dolomites being dramatic and generous in equal measure. Ellie didn’t flinch. Matt cried. The handfasting used lace from the hem of her dress. The mountains were soft behind them in the clouds.

The storm cleared and left the air clean and the visibility impossible. We shot until 11pm. Somewhere after the blue hour and before the full dark, a family of foxes appeared and began wandering around our abandoned pizza boxes. That was the end of Day One.

Day two brought Seceda: a cliff face that only exists as promised when the fog lifts at the right moment. We waited. It lifted. The photographs from those twelve minutes are among the most compelling I’ve made in the Dolomites. Then Alpe di Siusi at golden hour, the wooden chalets, the meadows, the peaks in perfect display behind two people who had stopped caring about anything except being exactly where they were.

Five international photography awards came out of this elopement. But the thing Ellie wrote in her review, over a year later on their anniversary, was that she still doesn’t know how to use words to describe it. That’s the part I keep.