What Gives?
Why do you live on Cortes? And are you happy? What do you do?
Darshan lives on Cortes because Alex lives on Cortes. Alex lives on Cortes because he used to live in California and when he was 7 years old he decided he was going to live in Canada because he didn’t like President Nixon and also, he didn’t like war. Alex kind of decided what he wanted as a small child and hasn’t changed since. (He became vegetarian at age 3 and never looked back).
Sometimes we are sort of ecstatic, sometimes we are really sad, but usually we are just overwhelmed and tired because we have a toddler.
We like literature quite a lot; we read novels or the New Yorker when we can wrest a moment away from our toddler, and Darshan has a parasocial relaitonship with Deborah Treisman.
Our favorite summer pastime is swimming naked in the lake or the ocean and playing pickleball and Ultimate Frisbee. We used to play guitar and piano before we had a kid. Darshan feels like maybe she should have been a writer? Alex prefers playing the flute and looking at the ocean. We are also practising therapists and weirdly know quite a lot about QAnon, conspiracy theories, and cults.
The photograph to your left was taken ten years ago. Before we had children. We do not look like this anymore.
Are you obsessed with your dog?
We used to be, in the before times, but now we have a child. Our life isn’t the same as it used to be. Notice perhaps that the latest blog posts on this webpage are from years and years ago.
Are you actually in love like in this photograph? And can you make us look this in love?
Sometimes we are actually this in love.
100% we can make you look this in love in photographs. Even if you just had a blow-out fight right before our photo session. We will bring out your inner shine for each other.
Why naked people?
Because after ten years of photographing weddings Darshan needed a project that would rekindle her artistic perspective, and make her approach photography in a new way.
Also, she’s a nudist, and weirdly enough, she consider it a kind of cause. She thinks of casual and social nudity as a kind of antidote to body-shaming, and the power that body-shaming has over us as humans.
So she combined her cause with a desire to photograph people being raw and vulnerable. Amazingly, she found some people who wanted to take off their clothes and say “here I am, go ahead and put my photo on your webpage — no one can shame me by looking at my naked body on a screen.”
That’s cool. But also, you don’t have to agree to be on the webpage if you wants some naked photos of yourself, or yourself and your partner.
Are you actually good at shooting weddings? Or will you just take weird art shots all day?
No it’s true. Darshan shot entirely documentary style for the first few years as a wedding photographer as a way to cover up that she didn’t really know anything about light or how to take good portraits. Then she went in the complete opposite direction and only cared about light, and art shots, and beautiful sparkly backgrounds — and often missed the moments unfolding around her. She likes to think she is now taking the middle path.
Are the photos good now, and is the coverage of the day comprehensive? Darshan is clearly not the one to ask, as she thought she was great all along — only in retrospect does she shake her head in admirable wonder at the delusion.
Check out the Wedding Gallery and judge for yourself:
What else do you do?
We’re therapists. I’m serious. But Alex refuses to have a therapist webpage.
Will you wear weird clothes to my wedding?
Only if you request it. We actually do have some normal clothing collecting mothballs in our closet. Don’t worry, we’ll launder it before wedding season.