Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Jaimie Krause. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Jaimie, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today To kick things off, we’d love to hear about things you or your brand do that diverge from the industry standard.

Wedding photography (and the wedding industry as a whole) has evolved over the years. It went from being a simple visual documentation of the marriage of two people into a massive 12 hour photo shoot with Pinterest perfect details, Instagram worthy portraits in epic locations, Tik Toks throughout the day, custom hashtags, llamas and alpacas. signature cocktails, firework displays, sparkler exits leading out to a vintage car covered in florals, and on and on and on. I’m taking wedding photography back to its roots. Back to the days of simple documentation of a day. Without the excessive pressures of the post 2k world. I want couples to know it’s okay to not go into massive debt for a 4 hour dinner party. It’s okay to not have elaborate anything. It’s okay if you don’t have a hashtag. It’s okay if you just want to spend the day with your loved ones instead of taking hours upon hours of posed photos. It’s okay to just be yourselves and enjoy your time with your people without all of the unnecessary extra.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’m Jaimie, a documentarian with a camera. Mama to Gigi. Cat person. Feminist. Houseplant collector. Metal head. Avid life-long thrifter. I dislike pants and Diet Culture. I believe that Love is Love and Black Lives Matter. I’m an OG weird kid with a pretty good sense of humor. I’ve always been whatever the opposite of cool is, and not in the way that not cool is cool now. But I think when I’m 80 it’ll work in my favor and I’ll be like, super badass. I split my time between St. Louis, MO where I’m from, and my little desert cabin in Twentynine Palms, CA, where I feel most at peace.
I’m the kind of photographer you come across once in a great while. I’m not just “a chick with a camera”. This has been my career for the past 22 years. I am constantly learning and growing and evolving. Documenting the world around me has been an obsession of mine since I can remember, for I’m not sure what reason. It’s just always been a driving force for me.
I am a calming presence behind the camera. I focus on documentary coverage and candid moments. I create safe spaces to capture genuine moments. Because it’s not just about the location of the photos. It’s about the people in them.
Trends will come and go. But the story of people will never go out of style.

Have you ever had to pivot?

I’ve had to make a lot of pivots over the last 20+ years of photographing weddings, but the most profound pivot for me was over the course of 2018 and 2019. I was on the verge of burnout. The stress of everything had me pushed to my breaking point. I knew something had to change. I was disgusted with the wedding industry as a whole. I was tired of seeing nothing but thin, white, straight, young, attractive couples everywhere. Every photo had to be “epic”. The details had to wow. Couples had lists of Pinterest Poses and Instagram photos they just *had* to recreate. And the fatphobia that runs rampant in the wedding industry is enough to make me irate on a good day.
When a bride blew my phone up at 2am one night because a cake plate wasn’t the same shade of gold as photo frames and she needed to know RIGHT THEN if I could photoshop them to be the exact same color or everything wouldn’t look Pinterest Perfect like she’d been dreaming of, I knew something had to change. Since my degrees are in photography and it’s all I’ve ever done, it’s a lot harder to change occupations for me. So I made a huge pivot in the way I approached weddings.
I attended the first ever All You Witness (On Instagram @allyouwitness) retreat for photographers and it truly changed my life. Instead of feeding into the wedding industry’s over-the-top idea of what every wedding should be, I took a step back, reassessed, and went back to the basics, and the core of what I loved about weddings: the storytelling aspect of it. And from there, I’ve made it my mission to bring change to the world (even if it’s just small changes) through every interaction.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

My mission is to be anonymous. I’m there to tell a story. It’s not about me. It’s not about my Instagram grid. It’s not about likes or followers. It’s about the two people getting married. It doesn’t have to look perfect. It just needs to be an accurate depiction of what happened on that day. My goal is for my couple to look at their photos 10, 15, 20 years down the road and not remember me. I don’t ever want my couples to look at their photos and think about something the photographer made them do. When they look at their photos, I want them to be transported back to that moment. I want them to remember what was going on when the photo was snapped, or if they weren’t there, maybe they wonder what their grandmother and aunt were laughing so hard about. Admittedly, it’s a lot more difficult to shoot in this way. To not constantly take control of every situation and make it what I want. There’s a skill in creating space for people to just BE. And something I often hear from my clients and others is that they feel very calm around me. They don’t feel pressure. They feel like it’s okay to just go on with the day. And I love hearing that, because it means I’m doing my job and fulfilling the goals I’ve set for myself.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://jaimienicolekrause.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/jaimienicolekrause
• Facebook: Facebook.com/jaimienicolekrausephoto

Image Credits
all photos copyright Jaimie Nicole Krause