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 motion films and stills with the USN Combat Camera Group and did correspondence work for CBS and Edward R. Murrow and the program “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 including with clothing company Guess. 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 images. 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 southern 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 moved towards working with couples photography with my inspiration coming from the work 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 through the streets, embracing, and kissing on the historic bridges of historic Eastern European cities, and lovers spending intimate moments in cozy cafe’s, something stuck with me. It inspired me to travel more and more in the balkans, spending more and more of my time in Belgrade, my second home and a city close to my heart. 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 in Tucson Arizona capturing couples and their weddings, then recharge my batteries for 6 weeks in the end of Winter and throughout the early Spring in Belgrade and Aix-En-Provence which have become a second homes to me.
Mark | FLWL