Real Weddings, Advice, & Inspiration

Catalyst Wedding Company highlights weddings by and for game-changers. We seek to amplify and empower voices and viewpoints that are usually missing from the Wedding Industrial Complex. We're a community of badass wedding professionals who love all things funky, fresh, diverse, unique, and personality-driven; we convene twice yearly for (un)convention, a collaborative workshop, styled shoot, and dinner party. We're also the publishers of Catalyst Wedding Mag, a resource for couples looking for inspiration and affirmation that doing things differently in wedding-world is not only ok, it's wonderful!

Our aim was to create a styled shoot that focused more on emotion and the narrative experience of planning a marriage than simply the glitz and staged still life that is the norm for styled shoots. We partnered with a real life couple to tell the story of what happens when a couple becomes engaged, endures the stress of early planning, and then decides to be true to themselves and elope. We wanted to create inspirational images unlike those we'd seen before, such as a woman proposing to her male partner, and the honesty of the "fuck it, let's elope" scene. In sum, we hope that our imagery pleases in not only an aesthetic way that shows off awesome details such as the Ash & Light sequined dress, but that it also hits an emotional chord and rings true about the underlying experience and significance of the wedding planning process.

Photos and words by Alexis Buryk of City Love Photography. You can see a full list of vendors at the bottom!