The Story
Chloe and Ben didn't want a wedding. They wanted a marriage. The distinction mattered to them enough that they flew to Punta de Mita with a small suitcase, a silk dress, and an appointment with an officiant.
Punta de Mita is forty-five minutes north of Puerto Vallarta on the Nayarit coast. It's quieter than Vallarta, more residential, with a few extraordinary luxury villas hidden behind high walls and sea grape hedges. The villa Chloe and Ben rented for four days was one of those — three levels, an infinity pool, and a terrace that looked directly at the Marietas Islands.
I arrived in the mid-afternoon. Chloe was reading. Ben was cooking. They'd had lunch already and were completely relaxed — no florist had come, no coordinator, no caterer. Just the two of them and the Pacific.
The ceremony happened at 5pm on the villa terrace. The officiant, a woman Chloe had found through a local recommendation, conducted a ceremony in both English and Spanish. Ben spoke his vows in Spanish, which he'd been practicing for weeks. Chloe didn't know. The expression on her face when he started is the central image of this gallery.
What I love most about photographing elopements like this is the absence of the traditional wedding day architecture — no schedule to keep, no guests to corral, no cocktail hour waiting for portraits to finish. We moved through the afternoon together, Chloe and Ben and me, stopping when the light was right or when one of them reached for the other's hand. The Marietas Islands appeared and disappeared behind ocean haze. The light shifted every fifteen minutes.
By the time we finished on the beach at Playa El Anclote — barefoot in the sand, the sun fully gone, the sky still pink — I had three hundred images and the feeling that I'd spent an afternoon with two people who'd made exactly the right decision.