Meet For Love With Love's Photographer | Mark Peterson

Tucson Arizona’s Documentary & Editorial Wedding Photographer

Photographer Mark Peterson | For Love With Love

(Photo: M. Markovic | Belgrade, Serbia)

I’m a second generation photographer and I love, love, love, my work with couples and their weddings. My father during the Korean War shot with the USN Combat Camera Group and did correspondence work for CBS and Edward R. Murrow and “See It Now”. There were always film cameras in our house, photography books, and boxes of 1950’s photos and negatives close by. Being the curious kid with mechanical objects I took an interest in my father’s old medium format Rolleiflex’s.

During my college and university years I took an interest in shooting landscapes absent of people and minimalist details of Architecture which I was studying. I worked in the Santa Monica Architectural offices of Martin Gelber and Thane Roberts, absorbing their bold, modern design visions and being involved in projects throughout Southern California. Back then I couldn’t imagine photographing people and it wasn’t until moving from California to Texas in 1999 that people became center focus (no pun intended) with my camera. At first I placed much of my attention into street photography, which really helped me strengthen my fast eye and my interest in contrasty black & white images. I honestly don’t know where my photography would have taken me if it weren’t for my years shooting instinctively as a street photographer, but in 2010 I went back to school in North Texas taking evening classes at the Dallas Center for Photography to learn studio lighting techniques.

In 2012 my website which remained incomplete and disconnected for over a year went online. It’s gone through monthly revisions ever since as I fine tuned my brand and began capturing portraits and small weddings. Today my small business For Love With Love now based in Tucson, Arizona is my ever growing documentary photography baby (well, it’s a teenager about to begin high school). My business has taken me to wedding celebrations and travels throughout the city of Tucson and its many venues, to the east coast state of Maine, in the southern US states of Texas, Arizona, and west coast of California. My work spans into other cities and countries including Montreal QC, San Miguel De Allende Mexico, Madrid Spain, Zagreb Croatia, Belgrade Serbia, Munich Germany, and Aix-En-Provence France.

Over the past 10 years I took a strong interest in the couples photography works of Eastern European photographers from Ukraine, Russia, and the Balkan countries of Croatia and Serbia. Somewhere between the flowing movements of trench coats and couples running, embracing, and kissing throughout the streets of historic Eastern European cities something stuck with me. I’ve taken bits and pieces of those visions and incorporated that into my own work. I am a romantic to my core and today my photography consists of a mixture of my minimalist mindset with the movement of couples and bit of candid, documentary, and editorial imagery.

What direction do I want to take my business today and into the future? I would like to spread my weddings out to a few countries and make traveling for weddings every couple weeks to be more frequent with less of my work here in Arizona and the states. I imagine a permanent base for my small business being established in Southern France or Belgrade, Serbia (or both) in the future and eventually will shift my entire focus to work within Eastern Europe and Europe entirely. For now I spend my Fall, Winters, and Summertime here capturing couples and their weddings and recharge my batteries for 6 weeks in the end of Winter and early Spring in Belgrade which has become a second home to me.

Mark | FLWL