Three Weddings. One Family. What It Means to Photograph the People Who Knew You First.

I’ve spent most of the last decade photographing weddings in Antigua Guatemala. Most people know me from there now. The volcanoes, the ruins, the old churches, the streets I’ve walked so many times I can almost predict the light before it happens.

But every spring I come back home to Tennessee, back to the farm I grew up on, back to my mom and my grandmother and my uncle and cousins, back to the pace of a place that has nothing to prove.

Not because I’m tired of Antigua. Honestly, I don’t think I could ever fully leave Guatemala behind. It changed my life and shaped so much of the way I photograph people now. But coming home every year resets something in me creatively in a way I don’t fully know how to explain until I’m actually here again.

Why I Come Home to the Smoky Mountains, Tennessee

I come back to visit family, spend time with old friends, drive through the Smoky Mountains, and sit in places that still feel almost exactly the same as they did when I was younger. I spend time on the farm where I grew up reading books, writing stories, wandering outside, and eventually becoming the kind of person who quietly observes people for a living without even realizing it yet.

Places like Cade’s Cove, Townsend, and the Smoky Mountains were a huge part of that for me growing up. There’s a particular rhythm to Appalachia that still influences the way I photograph people now, the closeness of family, the storytelling, the way memories become attached to places over time.

Even now, every time I come back, I end up driving through the mountains with a camera at some point. The pace is different here. People stay at the dinner table longer. Conversations stretch later into the night. Memories feel easier to sit inside of instead of rushing past you.

One of those families has been part of those Tennessee memories for most of my life.

Amy, Hannah's mom, has been one of my mom's best friends since I was young. Our families spent holidays together in cabins near the Smokies long before weddings were ever part of the story. I still remember Christmas weekends in the mountains, everybody squeezed into cabins together while the adults drank wine in the hot tub and we stayed upstairs watching movies, playing cards, or just staying up too late talking.

For years Amy used to joke that if she ever got married, it would only be so I could photograph the wedding one day. Eventually she met Bill, who was one of those guys who could seem serious at first, kind of old-school with a military background, but then a few drinks later he’d be laughing around a bonfire telling stories all night.

The First Wedding and Why It Changed How I Think About This Work

Photographing Amy and Bill’s wedding never really felt like work because by that point I already knew everybody in the room.

That wedding was also the first time I had ever professionally photographed a wedding with my own family in attendance. My mom was there, my grandmother, my sister, all of them guests while I was working, which was a strange and genuinely emotional thing to experience. I was moving through the day with my camera while also being emotionally inside of it the same way everyone else was. Looking back now, that was probably the first time I fully understood how different weddings feel when you already belong there before you ever pick up the camera.

That wedding ended up becoming the beginning of something much bigger than I realized at the time.

During Amy and Bill’s wedding weekend, I met Ryan for the first time. He was getting ready with Bill and immediately felt like someone who had already been around forever. Just easy to be around, genuinely kind, the type of person who naturally makes everyone else feel comfortable around him.

That same weekend Connor introduced me to Heather the night before the wedding. The sun was setting and the light outside was incredible, so I asked if I could steal them for a few quick photos before dinner. At that point I wasn’t even fully photographing weddings professionally yet, but I still remember standing outside with them while the light disappeared and taking a few frames that honestly are still some of my favorites all these years later.

If this is the kind of wedding photography you are looking for for your Tennessee or Smoky Mountains destination wedding, we would love to hear from you.

When Your Mentor Shows Up at the Same Wedding You Are Shooting

A while later Heather and Connor called me and asked if I would photograph their wedding too.

That wedding meant a lot to me for a completely different reason because they had also hired Justin Skeens, one of my earliest photography mentors and someone who taught me so much about working with people when I was first starting out. Photographing alongside him years later felt surreal in a way that is honestly hard to describe. It felt like different parts of my life quietly colliding together in the same room.

Edgar Marroquin, our film photographer at Joseph Nance Photography and someone I work alongside constantly in Antigua Guatemala, came to Tennessee for that wedding too. For Edgar it was his first time in Tennessee, and watching him move through a weekend that was so deeply personal to me meant something I did not fully expect. He got to meet my grandmother, spend time with my mom, and meet Justin, the person who helped shape the beginning of my photography career long before Antigua or destination weddings or any of this existed yet.

My Antigua life and my Tennessee life were suddenly sitting in the same room together, and somehow it all felt completely natural.

By the end of that wedding weekend Ryan pulled me aside and told me he hoped I was free the following year. Hannah and I are getting married, he said.

And that would be wedding number three.

If you are planning a wedding in Tennessee and want to work with us, check to see if your wedding date is available.

The Wedding I Had Been Picturing for Twenty Years

By the time Hannah and Ryan’s wedding came around, it didn't feel like traveling to Tennessee for work. It felt like going back to do what I love surrounded by people I have known my whole life.

I’ve known Hannah since we were both around fifteen years old, which changes the way you photograph someone completely. I already knew how she laughs, how she carries herself in a room full of people she loves, what she looks like when she is calm, and what she looks like when she is trying not to cry. I had pictured her wedding day in the loose way you picture things for people you care about deeply, and standing there photographing it felt less like doing my job and more like being exactly where I was supposed to be.

Their wedding at Harper’s Vineyard came with a forecast that made everyone nervous all week. Rain was predicted across all of Tennessee and it delivered almost everywhere except somehow right where they needed it not to. While storms moved across the rest of the state that weekend, the ceremony itself stayed completely dry. At one point during the outdoor ceremony the sun broke through the clouds for a few minutes in a way that honestly felt impossible considering the forecast everyone had been watching all week. Then later that evening the rain came back and the rest of the night carried on around it.

Some of my favorite moments from that day were not even the ones you would expect. Ryan dancing with the girls. Connor giving his speech. Hannah and Amy together during quieter moments between everything else happening around them. When you have known people long enough you notice things that a photographer meeting a couple for the first time simply cannot see yet. You know which moments are going to matter most to them years from now because you already understand the people inside of them.

If you are getting married at Harper's Vineyard or anywhere in the Smoky Mountains, get in touch to check your date.

What I Carry Back to Antigua Every Time I Leave

That is probably the biggest thing these three weddings taught me over the years.

The best part of photographing weddings is not really the destinations or the venues or even the scale of the events themselves. It is getting invited back into people’s lives over and over again and slowly becoming part of how a family remembers itself over time.

Antigua Guatemala will always feel like home to me creatively. There is nowhere else in the world that gives me the same energy or inspires me in quite the same way.

But Tennessee reminds me why I photograph people the way I do in the first place.

Every time I come back here, spend time with family, drive through the Smokies, sit on the farm, or reconnect with people I have known most of my life, I end up carrying that feeling back with me to Antigua.

Some weddings eventually stop feeling like clients.

They start feeling more like people you genuinely care about.

That is what Tennessee keeps reminding me. And it is why I keep coming back.

For weddings in Tennessee, Antigua Guatemala, Spain, or anywhere that matters to you, explore the wedding gallery or follow along at @josephnancephoto on Instagram. We would love to hear from you.