Wedding photographer Carly Romeo empowers couples who don’t conform to traditional gender roles.

When Carly Romeo was researching photographers to capture an intimate celebration following her City Hall marriage back in 2015, she was disappointed by the lack of diversity in the available offerings. The majority of the photographers she found touted a stereotypical “boy meets girl” narrative, suggesting that the wedding would be the best day in the bride’s life and the pinnacle of her existence. Though Romeo’s partner is a man, she didn’t feel like they fit into antiquated gender roles. Romeo decided to serve couples to whom the wedding industry typically does not cater, and to present an alternate narrative of weddings to empower people who generally feel alienated by the industry.

Romeo’s desire for inclusivity is rooted in her own background. Prior to her career as a wedding photographer, she earned a degree in women’s studies from the University of Virginia, then worked for feminist activist Gloria Steinem in New York City. Romeo strongly advocates for intersectional feminism.  “Women being marginalized as a group is connected to people of color being marginalized, and also of class being an issue,” Romeo explains. As a result, she works with couples that exist outside the white, heteronormative narrative, which includes interracial, queer, and minority couples. She strives to make each couple feel seen, understood and appreciated, and she challenges limiting gender stereotypes in the process.

One of the patterns Romeo wants to break is one that she calls “bride worship”—the idea that a woman has a special place over her partner on their wedding day, and that the day is more a celebration of the fact that she finally found a man. She finds this idea  to be severely outdated. “Women have so many achievements in their lives in addition to getting married,” she says, “and they don’t deserve or need a special praise because they found a spouse.” As a result, her photographs portray the bride and groom as members of a team who show up for one another in the presence of a highly supportive community, instead of the heroine and her hero with a fairytale-ending.

Romeo also deeply understands how much pressure and expectation is piled onto a single event. “It makes a difference when people feel like they can opt out of parts of the ceremony that don’t feel right to them,” she says. “Giving them permission to fully accept themselves as they are during their wedding, whatever that looks like in terms of makeup, outfits, or doing things their own way, is really awesome.” She recalls a recent interaction with a client when the bride asked Romeo if she was okay with her decision to not wear any makeup. This, of course, did not matter to Romeo at all, but simply showed her how much anxiety exists among couples of not being “enough” or “right.” Another time, she helped a bride feel comfortable with her decision to not have her father walk her down the aisle. “I feel good about helping people who are getting married to feel empowered to make their own choices,” she says, “and about documenting it all in a way that feels validating to them.”

Romeo believes her biggest responsibility as a visual storyteller is to capture couples in a way that resonates with them. She wants to create a visual account of people who are opting out of the traditional wedding system. “I want each couple I work with, as well as their kids and grandkids, to look at their photos and feel seen; not just as people playing the roles of bride and groom, but simply as individuals.”

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