The Taggart Family – 2020

Eric and Julia in November. This sweet backyard wedding and night goes down as one of my favorite memories of 2020. Our evening ended (as she mentions below) with cheering, clapping, and crying while watching Kamala and Joe. My “job” was done around 7:00, but I was welcomed in to witness history and quite honestly didn’t want to leave this wonderful group of strangers. There was something so powerful about experiencing these emotions alongside them. I’ll never forget it.

“Originally, we planned to have a 200 person wedding on a vineyard in Austin. We had actually just received our Save the Dates one week before our jobs sent us home to work remotely. We made the decision to postpone the big party but not to delay the actual marriage itself. We kept our original November 2020 date but switched to a 16 person guest list in the backyard of a family friend, Julie Watkins. When Julie heard about our cancelled wedding, she not only offered to host but also assembled a dream team of women who came together to put on our wedding day. It was absolutely beautiful from start to finish and was made all the more special by the Election being officially called for Biden & Kamala! We got to spend our day excited and confident about the future in more ways than one. In a very bizarre year, we feel lucky to have been able to celebrate our marriage at all.”

Photographed in Houston, TX

Venue: Home of a family friend
Dress: Theia from Unbridaled
Hair & Makeup: The Fairest One
Linens & furniture: Swift + Company
Caterer: El Tiempo
Cake: Moeller’s Bakery
Flowers: Assembled by family friend Annette Schatte

Scott & Virg’s Quarantine wedding, May 2020. I feel a lot of weight when photographing weddings. They’re all historic moments. But the honor of capturing this one, in the middle of a pandemic, was not lost on me. More than ever I  was so aware of how their future kids, maybe grandkids, would look at these photos from 2020. Thank you to my friends for letting me be a witness.

“The original plan for our wedding was to have a small ceremony in the chapel St. Luke’s followed by a larger reception at Armadillo Palace on May 16, 2020. To be honest, a large, traditional wedding had never been my dream, but it had snowballed into that during the wedding planning process. In March, it of course became apparent that our plans would need to change in light of COVID-19. After surveying our options (thanks to our amazing wedding planner who made that part easy!), we decided the safest thing to do was to postpone the reception until October. However, we still wanted to find a way to get married in May and start our life together. The next two months were full of attempts to make decisions amongst so many ever-changing unknowns. At the end of the day, we decided the most important thing to us was to include as many of our loved ones as possible. And this meant getting really creative. While only our immediate families would attend the ceremony, we moved it to the larger sanctuary so that the church could livestream it for all the people we wished could be there but couldn’t, including many family members across the country who couldn’t travel safely. I got ready with just my mom and sister but “Zoomed” with friends before walking down the aisle. The guests from Houston were invited to a car parade at the church, and many watched the ceremony from their phones (some even dressed in cocktail attire) in the parking lot so they could drive by after. And that evening, we had a small dinner with just our families, a sweet reunion after two months apart. In the end, even though it was so far from what we planned originally, our wedding was the most joyful celebration and reprieve from the fears and sadness of the pandemic. And ironically, it was kind of the intimate, non-traditional wedding I had always wanted!” – Virg

Photographed in Houston, TX

Venue: St. Luke’s United Methodist Church
Planning: Julie Marie Myers, Keely Thorne Events
Dress: BHLDN
Flowers: Flora + Fauna
Hair: Beautique
Makeup: Consultation with Maitee Miles