I have spent a decade and a half photographing weddings, and somewhere along the way I started losing my mind.
Not at the weddings themselves. The weddings have mostly been beautiful. Some of them devastating, in the best way. People I do not know holding their parents in tears at the altar, brides who walked down the aisle to a song their grandmother sang, grooms who refused to do a first look because they wanted to keep one thing sacred. Real people, real choices, real weddings.
What was making me lose my mind was the gap between what was happening in front of my camera and what the wedding publications would let me show you.
I would shoot couples whose weddings broke from the script in every way that mattered, and I would pitch the stories to the major bridal magazines. Crickets. Or I'd get a polite reply: not quite right for our audience.
The audience, as far as the legacy bridal world is concerned, is a woman who is twenty-eight years old, marrying a man who works in finance, holding a bouquet of white peonies in a tent on a farm somewhere. There are exactly four acceptable seating arrangements. The dress is from a list of pre-approved designers. The first dance is at minute thirty-six of the reception, photographed from the same low angle as every other first dance ever published.
I am not making fun of those weddings. Some of them are gorgeous. I have shot a hundred of them.
What I am saying is that the publications have decided, somewhere along the way, that this is the only kind of wedding worth covering. And the result is that the brides who color outside the lines — the ones in the leather jackets, the ones wearing black, the ones who skip the ceremony to go feed tacos to the band, the queer couples whose love story is not a footnote, the punk brides, the Vegas brides, the courthouse brides, the brides whose moms wore the dress before them — these brides watch the magazines and feel like their wedding is not the kind that gets to exist in the historical record.
That is the gap Rad Bride exists to close.
What we are not.
We are not the publication that will tell you which floral palette is trending for fall. We do not run "best of" lists scored by an algorithm. We are not interested in the photographer who has the most followers, only the one whose work moves us. We will not run sponsored content disguised as editorial, and when we do run sponsored content we will label it loud enough that you can read it from across the room.
We are not anti-tradition. Some of my favorite weddings have been the most traditional weddings I've shot. What we are against is the unspoken rule that there is one acceptable way to do this thing, and everything outside that lane is a mistake to be quietly ignored.
What we are.
We are an editorial publication for couples whose weddings are not going to look like a Pinterest board. The story comes first. The photography is the way we tell it.
Every feature on Rad Bride starts with a real couple and a real wedding. We interview the couple. We sit with the photographer's work and let it breathe. We write the story as if you were sitting across from us at dinner, hearing the wedding being recounted by someone who was there. We do not summarize. We do not flatten. We do not say "the bride wore a vintage dress" when what she actually did was tear a wedding gown apart and re-stitch it to fit her grandmother's lace.
The features are long because the stories are long. The photos are large because the photos are good. The vendors are credited because the vendors did the work.
That is the entire model. We are not reinventing anything. We are doing what bridal editorial used to do before it became a slideshow of the same five aesthetics on a fourteen second loop.
Who I am, briefly.
I'm Will. I run a wedding photography studio called Perla Images out of Cape Cod, and I have been the principal photographer there since 2018. My partner Angel Brown co-founded Rad Bride with me. She has a fresh eye for content and a real instinct for the looks and styles that catch on before the rest of the industry notices them trending. She'll also write here.
Some people will read that and assume that Rad Bride exists to promote my photography studio. I understand why anyone would think that. So I want to be direct: it does not, and we have built editorial guardrails to make sure it does not become that. Our editorial standards page explains exactly how we handle features involving our own work. Short version: Perla weddings will never exceed ten percent of what we publish in any quarter, and they get the same editorial scrutiny as every other submission. We are not the only publication ever to be edited by working photographers. Junebug was. Most of the publications that have actually mattered were started by people inside the industry who wanted something better than what existed.
We started Rad Bride because the publication we wanted to read did not exist. Now it does, and we get to fill it.
What's coming.
In the next few months, you will see real wedding features from photographers we genuinely admire. You will see directory pages for the alternative photographers, planners, florists, and dress designers we recommend without hesitation. You will see opinion pieces that take positions other bridal publications would never touch. You will see a manifesto that gets sharper as we figure out what we are.
If you are a couple planning a wedding that does not fit the legacy bridal mold, this publication is for you.
If you are a photographer whose work deserves more attention than the existing magazines have given it, this publication is for you too. Pitch us a feature.
If you are tired of seeing the same wedding over and over again, told the same way, lit the same way, planned the same way — this publication is for you most of all.
Welcome to Rad Bride. Pull up a chair.
— Will