Kate Thompson
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Category: Photographer
Location: Richmond, VA
Style: documentary, relaxed, narrative
Starting Price: $15,000
ABOUT VENDOR
Meet Kate Thompson
Kate Thompson (she/her) is a visual artist with over 15 years of experience photographing editorial projects and weddings in destinations worldwide. Her work has been published in The New York Times, Vogue, Over The Moon, Martha Stewart Weddings, Brides, and many more.
With over 400 weddings photographed, Kate is known for bringing empathy, a fine-tuned artistic eye, a quiet thoughtfulness, and a focus on legacy and family to gatherings large and small. She uses her camera as a way to connect with others and bring more love into the world. She is a big-picture thinker who moves into a creative flow while photographing weddings - finding moments of beauty and spontaneity and approaching every wedding with a calm, cheerful spirit.
Splitting her time between photography and design, Kate has developed a curator’s eye and sees each wedding as a collaborative opportunity. She keeps her body of work balanced in format with a rotation of a dozen different film cameras and a studio full of handmade prints and books, and is known for bringing the trifecta of light, composition and moment into each image.
Kate wandered a circuitous path to photography. She earned a Bachelor’s in Spanish from the University of Virginia followed by a Master’s in Bilingual Speech Pathology from Columbia University, ultimately using her linguistic education as a springboard back into exploring the visual language of photography. Kate has photographed events in destinations such as Spain, Italy, Mexico, India, Iceland, and Antigua, and her editorial work has been published in major newspapers and magazines across the globe.
How does Kate approach weddings?
A wedding is a joyful, emotional moment that punctuates a larger story of family and friendship. My approach to photography stems from the instinct to weave the tiny moments of a wedding day into a larger visual narrative, all while creating a relaxed environment where couples can feel genuinely themselves and focused on being present with their friends and family. Your experience on your wedding day is at the center of how I work.
I love thinking about photography as - in the words of Henri Cartier-Bresson - “a spontaneous impulse which comes from perpetually looking.” I love it because it reminds me that 99% of what we bring to wedding photography happens in the daily practice of observing the world around us - how as artists our compassion, our attention and our patience are the most valuable skills to fine tune. By intuiting my surroundings, I’ve learned to create a relaxed, light-hearted atmosphere that invites honest, authentic expression from my collaborators in front of the camera.
Over 15 years of experience and 300+ weddings has sharpened my instincts around where to be and when during each wedding interaction to optimize the beauty of the moment without compromising its truth. I see each wedding as a collaboration and an artistic practice, folding myself into the moment with warmth and sincerity and creating images that celebrate love in all its forms. It’s a privilege to do the work I do as a wedding photographer, and I keep that gratitude front of mind - with the goal of creating thoughtful, meaningful art as my north star.
What are some traits of your ideal clients?
Relaxed, focused on friends/ family experience
What are three of your favorite things?
Reading, hiking, cooking
TESTIMONIAL
“Working with Kate was absolutely incredible. Her work speaks for itself, it’s absolutely stunning. But her kind, caring and relaxed demeanor are what we came away from both our engagement and wedding photos that made our days. Kate went above and beyond in making us feel comfortable and like ourselves. I feel like we have made a lifelong friend and someone who we’ll hire again and again to document the big important events in our lives. Her work is beautiful and captures all the quiet in-between moments. You can see all the love we felt together and from our closes friends on our wedding day. She made our day more special by being part of it.”
