What 900 Weddings Teach You About Love

Amelie and Chris, June 2016 · Hacienda San Angel, Puerto Vallarta.

There are some questions that seem almost too obvious not to ask.

When I sat down with photographer Eva Šica in Puerto Vallarta, I thought I already knew where our conversation would begin. After photographing more than 900 weddings over more than two decades, surely she had developed some unique understanding of love. Before weddings became her life's work, she had studied photography and communications in Riga, Latvia, where fashion photography first captured her imagination. Fashion demanded precision, an understanding of light, movement, and composition, but it also taught her something quieter: how to observe people without interrupting them. Documentary photography eventually became just as important, allowing her to tell stories through moments rather than poses. Long before she photographed a bride walking down an aisle, she had already spent years learning how to notice the details that most people miss.

That background was part of what made me curious. Wedding photography wasn't where she started, yet it had become the work for which she is now best known. Today, through Ave Sol Photography, she has photographed weddings throughout Puerto Vallarta, Punta Mita, Sayulita, San Pancho, Riviera Nayarit, Careyes, and destinations beyond Mexico. Her work has taken her into intimate private villas overlooking Banderas Bay, secluded jungle estates, beaches where the tide becomes part of the ceremony, and many of the region's most celebrated luxury resorts. Over thousands of hours behind the camera she has learned not only how people move through these places, but how the light moves through them as well. Understanding that relationship between landscape, architecture, weather, and emotion has become one of the hallmarks of her work, and it's something we'll explore in our next conversation. I assumed all of that experience must have led her to certain conclusions.

So I asked what felt like the natural question.

“What have all these weddings taught you about love?”

She smiled before answering.

“I actually know nothing.”

I laughed, assuming she was being modest.

She wasn't.

That single sentence quietly dismantled the article I thought I had come to write.

Eva told me that when she first started photographing weddings, she believed experience would eventually reveal patterns. She imagined there would come a day when she could watch a couple for a few hours and instinctively know whether they would spend the rest of their lives together. She paid attention to the way they looked at one another, how they spoke, how their families interacted, convinced that after enough weddings she would begin to recognize the signs. Instead, every certainty she thought she had gained eventually disappeared.

“The couples I quietly worried about often built beautiful lives together. And some of the couples I thought would last forever simply didn't.”

She laughed again, though this time it sounded more like acceptance than amusement.

“The more weddings I photographed, the less I felt I knew.”

I wasn't expecting that answer. If anything, I expected the opposite. We often assume experience produces confidence, that after enough years immersed in one subject people become experts not only in the craft itself but in the human stories surrounding it. Eva had arrived somewhere entirely different. The longer she photographed weddings, the less interested she became in explaining other people's relationships. It wasn't because she had become cynical. Quite the opposite. She had simply seen too many exceptions to believe in easy answers.

As the conversation unfolded, I realized the article I had imagined before sitting down with Eva was quietly slipping away. I had expected to leave with observations about love. Instead, I found myself listening to someone explain why years of experience had made her less certain, not more.

Falling in Love with a Place

The conversation drifted backward, long before weddings entered her life, to the first time she visited Mexico.

She spoke about that trip almost as though she were remembering another version of herself. At first it was simply travel. Then she came back. And then again. Each visit made something quietly shift inside her.

“I cried every time I left.”

It wasn't something she could explain logically. She simply found herself boarding planes back to Latvia with tears in her eyes, wondering why leaving Mexico hurt so much. The feeling repeated itself trip after trip until eventually she stopped questioning it. She realized she wasn't falling in love with a vacation.

She was falling in love with a place.

That realization eventually led her to Puerto Vallarta, where she would build both her life and her career. Looking back now, it is tempting to see that move as inevitable, but listening to her describe it reminded me how little our lives actually feel inevitable while we are living them. At the time it was simply one decision followed by another, each one guided more by intuition than certainty.

How It All Began

Wedding photography entered her life in much the same way.

Someone needed help photographing an Orthodox Jewish wedding.

She agreed. That is how simply she tells the story.

The reality, of course, was much more chaotic. She knew almost nothing about Jewish wedding traditions. The celebration moved at a breathtaking pace, unfolding through rituals she had never witnessed before, surrounded by what felt like an endless sea of guests. She photographed nearly seven thousand images that day and finished completely exhausted.

“I remember thinking, ‘I’m never doing this again.’”

We both laughed.

It is difficult to imagine now, considering that one assignment eventually became a career spanning more than 900 weddings.

The Other Eva

When I asked what changed her mind, she didn't describe a spectacular venue or an unforgettable couple.

Instead, she began talking about another Eva.

The change in her voice was almost immediate.

She spoke about her friend with the kind of affection reserved for people who quietly change the direction of your life without ever intending to. This Eva was a wedding planner, but describing her that way hardly captures who she was. She carried herself with extraordinary grace. Before anyone realized there was a problem, she had already solved it. She had an uncanny ability to make nervous brides feel calm, worried parents feel reassured, and every family feel that their celebration mattered deeply. She wasn't simply organizing weddings. She was caring for people during one of the most emotional days of their lives.

As Eva continued describing her, something happened that surprised me.

I found myself getting unexpectedly emotional. We paused for a moment before continuing, and I remember thinking how strange it felt that a conversation I expected to be about wedding photography had suddenly become something much deeper. There was nothing dramatic about the story. She wasn't telling me about tragedy or asking for sympathy. She was simply remembering someone she loved and admired so deeply that every sentence carried quiet gratitude. It struck me that I could almost see this woman despite never having met her.

Not because Eva described what she looked like.

Because she described how she made people feel.

We spend so much of our lives measuring success by accomplishments, titles, and recognition. Yet sitting across from Eva, listening to her remember her friend, I was reminded that the people who shape us most profoundly often do so through kindness. Long after we forget what they accomplished, we remember how they cared for us.

What the Camera Sees

After her friend passed away, those lessons never left.

Eva told me she still carries them into every wedding she photographs. Weddings stopped feeling like productions and began feeling like gatherings of families whose lives had intersected for a single day. Every celebration carried decades of history into one room. Parents letting go of children. Grandparents watching another generation begin. Old friendships. New families. Quiet reconciliations. Private grief. Shared joy.

The ceremony might last thirty minutes.

The stories inside it had often been unfolding for generations.

“When everyone else is watching the bride and groom,” I asked, “what are you looking at?”

“Proportions,” she answered almost immediately.

The word surprised me enough that I asked her to explain.

She told me that years of studying photography had trained her eye to instinctively notice balance, posture, movement, and light before almost anything else. Composition happens almost subconsciously now. It is simply how she sees.

I mentioned that one of the things I admire about her photographs is that they never seem to interrupt the day. They don't feel staged or intrusive. They feel as though the photographer somehow disappeared, allowing people to simply be themselves.

She smiled. That is exactly what she hopes happens.

Her goal, she explained, is to disappear into the wedding. The less people are aware of her presence, the more honestly they behave. She isn't trying to direct the day or manufacture moments. She's waiting for them to reveal themselves. The camera becomes a quiet observer rather than a participant, documenting the celebration as it naturally unfolds. But as she continued answering, I realized the examples she kept giving had almost nothing to do with composition.

She talked about fathers standing quietly behind the crowd while everyone else celebrated. Grandparents watching grandchildren dance. A mother sitting alone for just a few seconds after the ceremony while everyone else's attention had shifted somewhere else. Children wandering into unscripted moments that no one could have planned.

Without realizing it, we had drifted away from talking about proportions altogether. We were talking about attention.

The Photos They Come Back To

Eva explained that couples don't always understand those photographs immediately. At first they naturally gravitate toward the ceremony, the portraits, the first kiss, and the carefully planned moments. Years later, however, something changes.

“The photos they come back to are different.”

She told me that after parents or grandparents pass away, those quiet photographs become priceless. The father standing alone before walking his daughter down the aisle. A grandmother laughing during dinner. A child asleep beneath a table while everyone else dances.

No one asks for those photographs. Years later, they become the most important ones.

Listening to her describe that, I found myself thinking about photography differently. We often say photographers preserve moments, but perhaps that isn't quite true. Moments disappear the instant they happen. What photographs really preserve are future memories, details whose significance may not become apparent until decades later.

A Better Answer

By then, the question I had arrived with no longer seemed especially interesting.

What do more than 900 weddings teach someone about love?

Perhaps they don't teach us how to define love at all. Perhaps they teach us to become suspicious of anyone who thinks they can.

The longer Eva photographed weddings, the less interested she became in predicting people's futures or reducing relationships to simple explanations. Every family she met reminded her that outsiders never see the whole story. Every wedding challenged another assumption. Every year behind the camera made certainty a little less convincing and curiosity a little more valuable.

When I left our conversation, I realized I hadn't received the answer I expected.

I had received a better one.

I had arrived believing that experience eventually explains love. Eva had spent more than twenty years discovering that experience had done precisely the opposite. It had replaced certainty with humility, judgment with curiosity, and answers with better questions.

For someone who insists she knows nothing about love, she has spent a lifetime honoring it. Not by trying to explain it, but by quietly noticing it in all the places everyone else forgets to look.