Take the toll road south from Sarasota. Past the marinas at Placida, past the boats trailered for the morning. The bridge climbs once, a long careful arc over a green pass, and on the other side the world quiets. The Gasparilla Causeway lets you onto seven miles of barrier island that has been, for a hundred years, a kind of small American secret.
I have photographed weddings on Boca Grande since 2000. That year and every year since, for families whose names you would recognize and many you would not. The first was the DuPonts. They have all been at the Gasparilla Inn, or near it, or under the banyans on the long street between them. The island has not changed very much. The light, in particular, has not changed.
What follows is a working photographer's notes on Boca Grande, the venues, the seasons, the families, the specific quality of the light, and the way a wedding day moves through two miles of island and a hundred years of habit. I write this for the couple planning a wedding here. For the wedding planner trying to learn the geography. And, occasionally, for the photographer who has been asked to come down for a weekend and wants to know what to expect.
The island, briefly
Boca Grande sits at the southern end of Gasparilla Island, a thin barrier shoulder running parallel to the mainland Gulf coast. Two miles wide at its broadest, seven long, with the Gulf of Mexico on one side and Charlotte Harbor and the long quiet pass on the other. The town is small enough that there is one library, one school, one road in. There are no chain restaurants. There are no franchises. There is a single grocery store, a single hardware store. The streets are dressed in coquina and crushed shell. People ride bicycles.
It has been this way, more or less, since the railroad opened service in 1907. The Roosevelt, DuPont, and Bissell families came in those early decades. The Bush family came later. Generations after them returned with new wives and husbands. Many of the weddings on Boca Grande are not first weddings, not the brides and grooms of the morning programs, but the inheritors of the houses that were already on the island when their grandparents arrived.
The geography is the venue. The light, which a photographer learns to read in a single morning at the Pier, is the rest of it.
The Gasparilla Inn
The Inn opened in 1913. Its yellow clapboard facade and its courtyard and its long second-floor verandah have appeared in more wedding photographs than the rest of the island combined. The ballroom inside is small enough to fit one hundred and twenty for dinner and quiet enough that the orchestra never has to push.
I photographed my first Inn wedding for the DuPonts in 2000. Since then I have been a recurring photographer for the property, for resident families and for couples who fly in to use its rooms for the weekend. The staff know the work. They know which corner of the courtyard the morning light enters and which entry of the ballroom the bride and her father will appear at. They know which of the three porch swings on the second floor is the one that does not creak.
Most weddings at the Inn use one of three configurations. A courtyard ceremony with dinner inside. A Pavilion at the Pier ceremony with cocktails at the Inn and dinner under the porch. Or, the largest of them, a ceremony under the banyans on Gilchrist with a slow procession back to the Inn for the reception.
I have learned the Inn the way one learns a house one has lived in. The yellow paint is, to my eye, the second-best color the building wears. The first is the way the light falls on it at a quarter past five in February.
Banyan Street and the Pier
Two streets matter more than the rest. Gilchrist Avenue runs through the residential heart of the island and is canopied for half its length by a stand of banyans planted in the early decades of the last century. The trees have grown together overhead. The light beneath them is filtered into something that is not quite green and not quite gold, and it is, without exaggeration, the most reliable wedding-photograph light in the southern half of Florida.
Pier Park is the other. The Pavilion at the Pier stands at the southern tip of the island, looking out across Boca Grande Pass toward Cayo Costa. Couples are married here at the rate of two or three a weekend in season. The light at the Pier is different from the light on Gilchrist, it is harder, more saline, more present. The wind is sometimes a problem. The Pass is sometimes more interesting than the wedding.
If you ask me where to be photographed on Boca Grande, I will say Gilchrist and the Pier, in that order, with the Inn courtyard for everything in between.
Weather, light, by season
The Boca Grande wedding season runs from late October to early May. The shoulder weeks at either end are sometimes the most beautiful, fewer people, gentler light, more cooperation from the wind. The Inn typically reopens in mid-October. The last wedding I have photographed before the summer closure was in early June; the first one after has been in late October.
January through March is the high season for residents and for weddings. The light is short and slanted. Mornings are cool enough that brides will sometimes put a sweater on for portraits. Wind comes from the north. The Pass can run rough enough on Saturday morning that the Sunday ceremony is moved back to the courtyard.
April and early May produce my favorite light of the year. The trees on Gilchrist have leafed out. The Gulf is more glass than chop. The light at golden hour holds for thirty minutes longer than it does in January, and the late ceremony, six o'clock under the banyans, is its own kind of cinema.
Summer and storm season belong to the locals and the fishermen. I do not photograph weddings on Boca Grande in July. The Inn does not host them in July.
The families, briefly
I have photographed for the DuPonts. For the Bissells. For the Bush family. For many others, on the record and off it. The list of weddings I have made on this island is not a public record, and I do not keep one. What I will say is that the families who marry on Boca Grande tend to be families who have summered on Boca Grande, and they want the photographs to look like the family album they have been building since 1932. They do not want a wedding magazine spread.
What that means, practically, is a smaller team. Available light wherever it works. No staging that would not have made sense to their grandmother. A few formal frames in the courtyard, a few candid frames in the ballroom, and a great many quiet observations of cousins on the porch.
It also means a photographer who can be in a room for nine hours without being noticed.
A wedding day on the island
A Boca Grande wedding weekend is rarely a single day. The Friday rehearsal dinner is, more often than not, on the porch of a house owned by the bride's grandmother, a quarter mile inland. The Saturday day-of breakfast is at the Inn. The ceremony is in the late afternoon. The Sunday brunch is at the South Beach Bar and Grille or, more privately, back at the grandmother's porch.
On the wedding day itself, I arrive at the Inn around six in the morning. The light through the second-floor verandah is at its best at twenty past six in February. By eight, I am photographing the getting-ready in the bridal suite. By eleven, I am moving with the bride down to the pavilion or down Gilchrist for first-look portraits, if the family has chosen them.
Ceremony is typically four-thirty under the banyans or four-fifty at the Pier. The light in either location holds reliably for the next twenty minutes. Cocktails are on the porch at five-thirty, dinner inside at seven. The first dance is at nine. The orchestra plays until eleven. Sparklers line the path back to the car at eleven-fifteen.
The photographer is the last one to leave.
There is a particular hour after the orchestra has packed up and the family has retired to the porch when I am still working. The light has gone. The room is empty except for the staff turning down chairs. This is the hour the photographs from a Boca Grande wedding most reliably come from, not the ceremony, not the first dance, but the long quiet hour at the end.
What to ask a Boca Grande wedding photographer
A few questions worth putting to anyone you are considering for a wedding on the island. These are the same questions I expect to be asked, and the same questions I would ask if I were a couple making the decision.
- How many weddings have you photographed at the Gasparilla Inn? One does not learn the Inn from a single weekend.
- Are you insured for the property? The Inn requires it.
- Have you worked with the staff at the Inn or the team at Pier Park? Personal relationships make the day work.
- Do you bring a second shooter? For what hours? Useful, not always required.
- How do you handle the Pass timing, when ceremonies move from the Pier to the courtyard at the last minute? This happens. The photographer who has done it before makes the transition invisible.
Beyond the practical, there is a temperament question. The island does not respond well to a photographer who works it the way one works a Vogue cover. Restraint is the key word. So is patience. So is the willingness to be present without being present.
On inquiries
I book a small number of Boca Grande weddings each year. The earlier you can inquire the better. I work directly with the planner at the Inn and with the team at Pier Park, and I can recommend either if you need one. To begin a conversation contact me directly.
I have photographed weddings on Boca Grande for twenty-five years. The island has not changed very much. The light, in particular, has not changed. The pictures have.
