When Alicia reached out about photographing her wedding, we already knew her family. A few years earlier we photographed her sister Catelyn’s wedding at Aldo Leopold Nature Center, and that day set a pretty high bar for warmth, energy, and pure fun. So when we heard Alicia was getting married, we were just thrilled to be back with their family.
Alicia and Catelyn are twins. If you want to understand what that means for a wedding day, picture two women who are deeply accomplished, endlessly thoughtful, and somehow also the most enthusiastic people in the room at any given moment. Their conversations move fast. The stories don’t stop. The laughing is constant. Watching them together is one of the more joyful things we get to do at a wedding, and Catelyn’s maid of honor speech (packed wall-to-wall with twin stories) absolutely destroyed us.
Robert fits right in. He’s warm and kind in a way that’s immediately obvious, and the two of them together have a dynamic that’s easy and fun and full of delight in each other. That kind of thing reads in photos without any effort on anyone’s part.
We don’t photograph a lot of indoor weddings. Our instinct pulls toward outdoor venues, open fields, lakeside ceremonies, venues where the light shifts and the landscape does some of the work. So when we say the Madison Public Library surprised us, we mean it.
The Central Library event spaces occupy the entire fourth floor of the downtown Madison building, right off State Street. On the day of Alicia and Robert’s wedding, that meant a ceremony and cocktail hour in the art gallery hallways, dinner in the Community Room, and guests spilling out onto the rooftop terrace. Separate getting-ready rooms for the bride and groom. Everything contained in one building, one floor, flowing from one space into the next without anyone having to go anywhere.
The light on the fourth floor is the thing. Big windows, you’re up above the street, and on a hot summer day it felt less like being indoors and more like being suspended above the city. Ray has always had a thing for architecture (good lines, interesting geometry, spaces that have been thought about), and this building delivers. The art gallery hallways alone are worth the venue. We spent part of the portrait session just moving through them, letting Alicia and Robert have a little time to themselves while we worked with whatever the space gave us.
The stacks were the other surprise. We went downstairs into the library proper for a portion of portraits, and it’s the kind of location that doesn’t need much from you: rows of books, warm light filtering through, a beautiful and unexpected backdrop for a wedding day.
If you’ve been considering the Madison Public Library for your wedding and want to see what the fourth floor event space actually looks like in use, this is that post.
We’ve now photographed both sisters on their wedding days. Families who come back to us, or who send us their people, are the ones we feel most ourselves around. Alicia and Robert’s day was exactly that.
Wisconsin wedding venues we love | Catelyn + Corey at Aldo Leopold
