When the Water Finally Comes: A Dream of Becoming

Rachel after her ketubah signing while mourning the loss of her mother

Sisters, I had a dream…

I’m at a wedding, about to shoot the formal family photos when I look down and realize I only have one camera. I leave Meredith (my mentor) with the family and run back to my gear, which doesn't seem to be anywhere near where we are. The room where my cameras are stored is dark and there's people hanging out in it. There are bags and coats everywhere. I spend what feels like forever rifling through my bags trying to decide which cameras to bring and trying to find all of them. I'm very insistent on making sure I have everything even though I'm anxious of time ticking by and I wonder if Meredith already took the family portraits while I was gone. Finally I have my three cameras on me and I start to walk back. It appears I'm walking through my old high school. I see hallways and the football field in the distance but I can't figure out how to get to it. I ask someone for help. Things get hazy once I'm outside. Someone runs up to me and brings me to where Meredith has staged the family between two beautiful rows of trees. I start testing the light and figuring out how I want to shoot the scene. Back lit should look really nice. No one is upset that I was gone at all, which surprises me, we just get started. Meredith has everyone set up perfectly for me. I finally stand poised to take the picture when a wave, as if from the ocean, rolls in, soaking everyone up to their knees. Surprisingly, no one seems to notice or mind that their clothes are now soaked. Another wave comes in up to our chests this time. I'm trying to hold the cameras high above the water and I'm wiping away water that's splashed onto the top of them.

More camera parts. Loading a film camera. Shooting a film camera. In Genevieve & Tyler's house? Loading the dishwasher while talking to Ollie and Tyler. Instead of dishes I'm loading it with the pads Aunt Donna puts under her dish drying rack. The back of the kitchen is completely open, I get distracted and walk out into a busy scene of people. I walk up to a girl who's only wearing what seems like half a dress. I try to let a group pass me, three older black people, but they seem offended and all gesture sharply insisting for me to go first.

Sisters, this is my dream.

Dream from October 27th, 2024

A film noir inspired image from a wedding at the beautiful Oheka Castle, Long Island, NY

For years I’ve had this same recurring stress dream: I’m at a wedding during some crucial moment, when I suddenly realize in a panic that I don’t have my cameras. I’ve either left them at home or I’ve left them at the hotel, or I left them in the bridal suite and now we’re at the ceremony. I spend the first half of the dream trying desperately to reclaim my tools and the second half trying desperately to get back to whatever scene I was photographing. A few years into having this dream, a second recurring theme emerged. In this one I’m in a pool or some other body of water, I have my camera with me this time, but for one reason or another I’m trying, again desperately, to hold the camera above the water so it doesn’t get ruined.

I had in many ways dismissed these recurrences as ordinary stress dreams. Wedding photography is, after all, a stressful job with a great deal of pressure and there were other recurring dreams that felt more pressing to explore. It seemed perfectly reasonable, ordinary in a sense, that I would sometimes worry about showing up unprepared. The water dreams too seemed quite obvious, of course I would often be awash and occasionally overwhelmed by big emotions. Weddings are nothing if not full of big feelings.

But having kept a record of these dreams for so many years, and having revisited them with my dreaming circle time and again, I started becoming more curious about the other layers of meaning. Dreams speak to us on the level of myth and symbol, but the language of our dreams is unique to each of us. There are certain archetypal symbols layered in, but the symbol is delivered in a way meant to grab your attention. It was simple things that started to shift my perspective. One of my dreaming sisters for example mirrored the cameras to me using the word ‘tools’. I started to wonder what other tools I needed to gather in order move past the blockage the dream was pointing to. What was stopping me from reaching the ceremony? Were these dreams really about my clients’ weddings or were they speaking more about some kind internal union?

A candid moment of groom during a formal portrait session.

In the two years leading up to this dream I had rather unintentionally embarked on a process of transformation. It started with a desire for community. I had emerged from the pandemic to find a massive shift in my friendships and in my work. In the aftermath of quarantine, while the world was collectively emerging from their cocoon, many photographers enjoyed a huge boon of weddings. People were so joyfully happy to be outside and together. But in both my personal and professional lives, I was experiencing an isolation I didn’t fully understand. Many of my friends had left New York and some of my other friendships had ended and I found myself confused and struggling to book enough work. I set out trying to rebuild my friendships and community with the hopes that eventually this would stabilize my work as well. It was a long and slow process with a lot of lessons about fear that I’d been avoiding looking at up until this time. Eventually I was invited to a women’s retreat in Beacon with a group of wedding photographers I deeply admired. We all brought some photographs to share with each other, and at the time, I remember not even wanting to show a single wedding photograph. None of that work felt authentically me. I felt both vulnerable and defensive. Afraid and eager. I wanted to connect deeply, but I felt raw. Something about the retreat initiated a shift. I struggle even now to recall what it was. I think perhaps it was just the fact that I decided to show up for change.

Everyone in the group had been to retreats with a group of teachers that went by the Ritual Collective who were hosting a retreat that summer in Italy. John Dolan, a legend in the wedding photography world, was going to be at this one and I got it into my head that I needed to be there. My inspiration was frankly that I needed to network and meet these teachers who sounded mythic, gatekeepers to a part of the wedding world where clients cared about art and good photography. This was a chance to get to know these teachers on an intimate basis. I knew I could impress them with my photographs. Even though I was struggling to book the kinds of weddings I wanted, I felt a relief to think that I could show my work to people who I knew would understand it. These were photographers who had been photographing since the 80s and 90s, who had grown up in the world of film photography and photo agents. They spoke my language in a way that most people in the wedding industry never seemed to do.

So when I was selecting photographs to show them I decided that I could show them images that were incredible photographs first and wedding photographs second. Unlike trying to put my website portfolio together, where I felt eager to please brides and wedding planners, showing work to photographers made the editing process joyful and easy. I picked ten of my favorites and didn’t overthink it too much.

But still, I landed in Italy feeling vulnerable and terrified. A sense of homesickness ate at me. On the first day we drew straws to show our work, I was the seventh out of nine. I impatiently waited as we worked through the other portfolios. I could already tell my work was quite different, even the paper I had chosen to print on was something a bit special and I had chosen to print larger than everyone else had. I was determined to make an impact with my work I suppose. We were standing around a long table al fresco style. When my turn came and I laid my prints out, I felt a kind of massive energy shift, a collective gasp of sorts. I felt everyone take a step back from the table as if there were actual power in the images. In just that one moment I felt a weight I didn’t know I was carrying slide off my back. The conversation that ensued was very different from those that had come before me. One of my teachers asked me point blank, ‘Ok, so why are you here?’ I had to explain that regardless of my photographs, I was having trouble booking work. We set out to figure out why. We talked about how different in tone my website at the time felt to what I had laid out on the table. We explored what it would mean if I could let my website and portfolio have the same affect as these ten images. If I led from a place of strong photography first, wedding photography second, and what types of couples would then be drawn to me. It was a moment of feeling seen in a pure and innocent way. I hadn’t chosen these photographs to show off, I had chosen them because I knew they would be appreciated.

Things started to shift very quickly after this. The following day, in a private session, one of my teachers said, “The old Carey is gone now and she’s never coming back." It became immediately apparent that I needed to redo my website. Italy was in July and by November I booked a two-day intensive session with that same teacher to work on the website. In the meantime I had a handful of fall weddings to shoot and the shift in my work was absolute. What I discovered at that table in Italy was that I had been doing two jobs at once. I had been shooting on the one hand towards some sort of imaginary expectations that I perceived my brides to have and simultaneously shooting the story as I saw it. It was an impossible dichotomy in my mind that had built up over 15 years of trying to make couples happy and the wedding industry happy as well as discover who I was as a photographer. It was a long overdue build up of limiting thoughts that were so familiar to me I hadn’t been able to see they were in the way. Suddenly I felt free to fully be in the moment. The voice in my head that constantly questioned if I was in the right place for a photo not just quieted down but fully disappeared. It was an experience of presence that I had been striving for not just in my work but in my spiritual life and finally I felt it being actualized.

The dream that I opened this post with was just over a year after the retreat in Italy. I had more fun than I can even describe showing up to shoot that year. I couldn’t wait to put my cameras on and get to work. Not only did my work shift significantly, but the kinds of weddings I started to book immediately elevated. I had spent years reliving this dream where I would desperately try to get back to the crucial moment of the wedding. What was so exquisitely delicious about this dream in particular was that I finally made it back and made the photograph. This dream was a graduation and a sign that a transformation had been completed. And the symbol of the transformation was a birthing, was a wave of water rising up to my heart and soaking my camera gear.