A blue-green memory and a house on the bay
I was maybe nineteen the first time I saw Great Expectations. The 1998 one. I was with someone I would later marry, and later leave. I don't remember exactly where we watched it. What I remember is the color.
That blue-green. The old woman with her smeared makeup and her frozen world. The decay of that house holding something still alive inside it. The young boy allowed into a space that private — a witness to something he didn't fully understand yet. The dance. The intimacy of those frames. Small rooms with warm light. Hands. Faces.
I didn't know yet that the cinematographer was Emmanuel Lubezki. I just knew that the way he let light fall through a room changed something in me. The camera not rushing anywhere, staying still when another camera would have moved. Years later I'd understand that what I was responding to was a master at work — and that without knowing it, I'd been trying to see the way he sees ever since. This is my small way of honoring that.
The film opens with a line of narration: "I'm not going to tell the story the way it happened. I'm going to tell it the way I remember it."
I've never forgotten that. Maybe because it's also how I shoot.
My wedding work lives in that same space — double exposures, motion blur, painterly layers. Two moments existing inside each other. A face and a landscape bleeding together. The kind of image that looks less like a photograph and more like something half-remembered. I'm not documenting the day exactly as it happened. I'm capturing how it felt. The difference matters.
Patrick Doyle's score underneath everything, and Tori Amos woven through — I wore her albums out in those years, played them on repeat for hours the way you do when a song knows something about you that you're still figuring out.
I live on the Gulf Coast now. The same coastline the film was set on — I learned that later, the way you learn most things that matter, after they've already done their work on you.
And Cà d'Zan — the house on Sarasota Bay that Cuarón used as the decaying Paradiso Perduto — is right here. Venetian Gothic, arched windows, the kind of architecture that holds history in its walls. The grounds are outdoors — the terrace facing west over the water, the museum courtyard with its bronze David standing slightly absurd in the middle of it all. Ancient banyans. Light that does something different here than anywhere else I've been.
The first time I walked through I felt it again. That same charge from the film. Decay and grandeur next to each other. A place built by people who wanted to live passionately. Tall windows. Light with memory in it.
I don't plan shots. I show up and follow what I'm called to in the moment. I'm always looking for something underneath the surface — the five seconds before, the unguarded minute after, the face that doesn't know it's being seen. Images that get better the longer you look at them. The kind that feel found rather than made.
The Ringling asks for that kind of attention. The architecture, the history, the trees, the way light moves across stone and water. A wedding here isn't a backdrop. It's a conversation.
I haven't shot a wedding at Cà d'Zan yet. I want to. I'm saying that plainly.
