Josse and Alex were already married when I met them on the morning of August 1. They had done it at Midsummer, in Josse's hometown in Sweden, with the people who could get there. This Saturday at Whitefish Lodge in Crosslake was the other half, the one for everybody else, and knowing that changed how the whole day felt to photograph. Nobody was nervous about whether it would work. They already knew it did. What was left was the reason you marry twice in the first place: so that everyone who loves you gets to stand there while you do.
What a second wedding loses in first-time nerves it gains in something better. Josse's family had flown over from Sweden for this. Alex's people were the ones who had watched him leave to play hockey there and come home with her. Half the room had made the trip twice, or had missed the first one and were not going to miss this. So the day ran on reunion instead of anticipation, and it showed up everywhere: in how long the hugs lasted in the church lobby, in a dessert table that dozens of people had baked for, in the way the dance floor filled and simply never cleared. Two countries, two ceremonies, one very stubborn fact at the center of both. These two found each other across an ocean, and everybody in the building had watched some part of that happen.
MorningGetting Ready at Whitefish Lodge
The first thing I photographed was not a dress or a ring. It was dessert. Cookies and bars were already stacked in foil trays across the getting-ready room table, in front of Josse and her bridesmaids, hours before anyone would eat one. I did not fully understand what I was looking at yet. By evening I did.
Out in the lobby, an arched white sign on an easel read Welcome to Our Wedding, Alex + Josse, August 1, 2026, propped against a peeled-log railing under the stone fireplace. Alex got ready in the reception hall, and his mother pinned the white rose to his lapel, working the boutonniere flat against the light gray linen while he looked down at her hands, the way grown sons do when their mothers are close enough to fix something. She would read at the ceremony a few hours later. She would also, much later that night, be the reason he cried on the dance floor. Some threads you only see run through a whole day when you follow one person's hands.
Early AfternoonA First Look Under the Oaks
Because the ceremony was early, we did the first look and all of the portraits before the church, out on a shaded lawn on the lodge grounds. This is the practical argument for a Crosslake wedding that nobody makes in the brochures: the oaks and pines around the property throw soft, even shade for hours, so an early afternoon does not punish you the way open sun would.
Alex stood with his hands clasped and his eyes down while Josse walked up behind him. When he turned, he laughed first, and then he did not. He got about four seconds into looking at her before he had to reach for a handkerchief, and Josse stood there holding her bouquet and let him have the moment, smiling at him with the particular patience of someone who has seen him cry at her before and does not mind at all. That is the thing about photographing a couple who are already married. The reaction is not surprise. It is recognition. He knew exactly what he was turning around to see, and it undid him anyway. You cannot rehearse that, and you cannot fake it either.
The portraits stayed in that same pocket of shade, and they stayed easy. Her veil is long enough that we could work inside it, and two of my favorite frames of the whole day are the two of them cheek to cheek with the veil pulled over both of their faces, the green of the lawn going soft behind the tulle. Then the bridal party arrived and any remaining formality evaporated. Six groomsmen in gray suits and sage ties, bridesmaids in sage green, a cluster of kids in floral dresses, everybody laughing at Alex laughing.
AfternoonThe Ceremony at Immaculate Heart Catholic Church
Immaculate Heart sits a few minutes from the lodge, limestone on the outside with a white statue of the Virgin Mary set into an arched niche, bright and modern on the inside. In the narthex there is a stained glass window titled Sacrament of Matrimony: a bride and groom joining hands in front of a priest, backlit and glowing against the dark wall. It is not subtle. It is also exactly right.
Before anyone arrived I found Alex alone in the empty aisle, head down, hands clasped. Twenty minutes later that same aisle had a flower girl in a greenery and baby's breath crown walking it with a woven basket, and another one folded over the back of a pew with one eye showing above the rail, watching the whole thing sideways.
Josse came down the aisle on her mother's arm. They chose a Catholic ceremony outside of Mass, which meant readings, vows, rings and the nuptial blessing without the Eucharist, and it moved at a pace that let the small things land. Alex's mother read. During the rings, Josse got a few words out and then put her hand over her mouth and laughed instead, the laugh that happens when the feeling gets bigger than the sentence. It is the frame I would pick if I could only keep one from inside that church, because nothing about it was performed. She was just full. The priest raised his hand over their bowed heads. They kissed on the altar steps.
Then the recessional, which at a wedding like this one is not a walk so much as a receiving line at speed. Guests were reaching into the aisle for them. Alex was pointing at somebody in the third row. Josse had her eyes squeezed shut laughing, and out in the lobby a bridesmaid was already wiping her face with one hand and holding two bouquets with the other.
They had already promised each other all of this once, in another language, in another country. Watching them do it again in front of everyone who missed it was not repetition. It was the point.
EveningThe Fika Table
Now the desserts make sense. Fika is the Swedish practice of stopping for coffee and something sweet and treating the pause as the occasion, and Josse and Alex built one into their reception at Whitefish Lodge. Not a cake. A table. And they did not cater it. The guests baked it.
Chocolate chip cookies, brownie bars, lemon bars, thumbprint cookies with jam, pizzelles, cinnamon rolls, all of it stacked on tiered white plates and scalloped platters against the pine-paneled wall, with a hand-lettered sign in the middle that read Fika: a moment to indulge and appreciate the good things in life. The best photograph I made of it does not have a single dessert in focus. It has six women standing shoulder to shoulder behind the table holding their tiered plates, one of them still in a baker's apron, looking straight down the lens like a team photo. Because that is what it was. Nobody bakes like that for strangers. Every tray on that table was somebody saying, in flour and jam, that they were glad these two found each other.
If you grew up in the Midwest this will sound familiar, because a cookie table is the same instinct with a different accent. The difference is what fika asks of you afterward. You are supposed to stand there with it. And people did, all night, drifting back to that wall between songs.
NightThe Reception at Whitefish Lodge
The banquet room at Whitefish Lodge is the reason a lot of couples book it: 4,500 square feet, two stone fireplaces, a vaulted ceiling and a built-in dance floor, so the room already looks like a north woods lodge instead of a hotel ballroom. Josse and Alex draped it in white fabric and string lights and hung a neon sign reading The Koopmeiners above the head table.
Three girls in matching floral dresses came in first, one of them carried overhead. Then Josse and Alex, hands up, drinks in hand, into an empty floor. The speeches went where speeches go when the people giving them have known you a long time: Alex laughing behind a folded note, groomsmen raising a microphone and a can at the same time, and then a quieter one that got both of them, Alex wiping his eyes with a napkin while Josse held him around the shoulders under that neon sign.
Their first dance is the frame at the top of this post. She has a hand on his cheek and they are both laughing at something nobody else heard. Later he danced with his mother, the same hands that pinned his boutonniere that morning and held the reading that afternoon now resting on his shoulders, and his face came apart completely while the room stood around the edge of the floor and let him have it. Nobody moved to fill the space. Everyone understood the moment belonged to the two of them, and that watching quietly was its own way of being part of it.
Then it went loud and stayed loud. A guest in a bright floral dress holding Josse's face in both hands. Josse lifted straight overhead with her arms out, groomsmen underneath her, everyone else clapping. Somewhere in the middle of all that there was a table of cookies going down fast, on the far wall, exactly as intended.
Planning a Whitefish Lodge Wedding in Crosslake?
A Whitefish Lodge wedding gives you a banquet room with real character, 54 cabin-themed rooms so your people can stay put for the weekend, and a Crosslake location that photographs well in shade all afternoon, which matters more than couples expect when the ceremony is early. Pairing it with a church ceremony in town, the way Josse and Alex did with Immaculate Heart, is a common and easy combination here. The drive is short and the light between the two is generous.
I photograph throughout the Brainerd Lakes area and the Whitefish Chain regularly, so there are no travel fees for Crosslake. If you are planning something here, or something that spans two countries and two celebrations, reach out and tell me about it. The couples who feel most at ease in their photographs are usually the ones who were sure of each other long before the camera showed up, and Josse and Alex are proof of what that looks like on film. Most couples book twelve to eighteen months out, and summer Saturdays on the Whitefish Chain go first.
Frequently Asked Questions
Whitefish Lodge & Suites is in Crosslake, Minnesota, on the Whitefish Chain of Lakes, about 25 miles north of Brainerd and roughly 2.75 hours north of the Twin Cities. It is a different place entirely from The Lodge at Whitefish Lake in Whitefish, Montana, which is what most search results will show you first. The Minnesota lodge has a 4,500 square foot banquet room with two stone fireplaces, a vaulted ceiling and a built-in dance floor, plus 54 cabin-themed rooms on site, which is why so many wedding parties stay at the venue for the whole weekend. Josse and Alex held their reception there in August 2026.
Yes. A Catholic wedding can be celebrated either within Mass or as a ceremony outside of Mass, sometimes called a wedding in the Rite of Marriage. It still includes the readings, the vows, the exchange of rings and the nuptial blessing, but it does not include the Liturgy of the Eucharist, so it runs shorter, generally around 30 to 40 minutes. Josse and Alex chose that form at Immaculate Heart Catholic Church in Crosslake, and one practical upside for photography is that the ceremony ends earlier in the afternoon, which leaves more daylight between the recessional and the reception. Your parish is the right place to confirm what it will and will not include for you.
Fika is the Swedish habit of stopping for coffee and something sweet, and treating that pause as its own occasion rather than a snack. At a wedding it usually takes the form of a dessert table rather than a single cake. Josse and Alex's fika table at Whitefish Lodge was built almost entirely by their guests: chocolate chip cookies, brownie bars, lemon bars, thumbprint cookies, pizzelles and cinnamon rolls, carried in on tiered plates and arranged around a hand-lettered sign. If you have seen a Midwestern cookie table, it is a close cousin. The difference is that fika is about lingering over it.
The ones I see travel best are the ones guests can participate in. A fika table is the clearest example, because it turns dessert into something the whole family contributes to and then stands around. Beyond that, couples with family abroad often hold two celebrations, one in each country, which changes the feel of the second one considerably. By the time Josse and Alex married in Crosslake they had already been married in Sweden at Midsummer, so the American day carried less nervousness and more reunion.
In midsummer the strongest window is late, roughly 8:00 to 8:45 PM, when the sun drops toward the Whitefish Chain. But for an early afternoon ceremony you often cannot wait that long, and Crosslake gives you a good alternative: the mature oaks and pines around the lodge grounds throw soft, even shade all afternoon. Josse and Alex did their first look and all of their portraits on a shaded lawn under those trees in the early afternoon, well before the ceremony, and the light stayed gentle the whole time.
