ABOUT ME, ABOUT RIVANNE
Where did it all begin?
There is a photo strip on my mother-in-law's refrigerator. It is from a wedding back in 2018, the year I met my husband, and it has him and his brothers in it, their mom tucked into a couple of the frames. She is not someone who keeps trinkets or fills her home with mementos. And yet that little strip has survived every move since, from Georgia to Virginia, and five or six moves within Virginia alone.
Every single time, it goes right back up on the fridge.
I'm Elizabeth, and that strip is more or less the reason Rivanne exists.
We have a hundred "memories" saved on our phones that we will never scroll back to. A printed photo is different. It ends up on refrigerators and in wallets, in a box you open years later. On my own fridge there are about ten strips from the last few years. I have a box of little instax and polaroid photos I have been adding to for over a decade, and opening that box feels nothing like swiping through a camera roll. That feeling is what I want to hand to people.
I have been the unofficial photographer of my own life since middle school. There are Facebook albums from 2012 of me hauling a DSLR onto the dance floor at school dances, and later prom, just so everyone went home with a picture. I went to an arts school in Connecticut, majored in visual arts for four years, and have had a camera in my hands for more than fifteen years. I am not a wedding photographer, but I know my way around a lens, and I understand the light that makes a person look like themselves on a good day. I even shot my own website portraits!
Somewhere along the way I also became the family party planner, the one who goes all out for every gathering, from Eid celebrations to weddings, with custom backdrops and a DIY photo booth and a whole quarter machine I bought just for our parties for the kids. When my husband and I married, a small nikkah in our home on Thanksgiving, I designed and decorated the entire day myself, down to an eight-foot arch I built by hand. I rigged up my first photo booth that night too: a camera on a ring light, tied to an iPad and a little printer. It barely cooperated, but the handful of group photos it managed to print are some of the only ones we have of our guests, and I love them.
Rivanne did not begin as a business idea. It began as the thing I was already doing, over and over, because I could not help it.
When it came time to choose a booth, I did not want a plastic kiosk or a screen on a stand. I wanted something beautiful in its own right. Ours is a vintage-style portrait booth, hand-built in the United States from real oak by a small, veteran-owned company, and I am proud to put my name beside theirs. It looks like a piece of furniture, the kind of timeless, mid-century thing I fill my own home with. That is the point. At a wedding it should belong in the room, quietly, not stand out like a giant chunk of metal in the corner.
I run every event myself. When you book Rivanne, you work with me from the first message to the last photo. (My husband signed on to invest in a business and somehow also became my driver and my heavy-lifting crew. He is not complaining. Much.)
The thing I care about most, in this and in everything, is respect. Respect for your day, for your money, and for the trust you are handing me. I will not take a booking and arrive unprepared, and I will not treat a corner of your celebration carelessly. I spent years in hospitality and luxury service, and making someone's day a little easier is genuinely the thing I am best at. When you hand this piece of your day to me, I want you to feel three things: confident that it is handled, at ease enough to forget about it, and excited to get in front of the camera yourself.
Rivanne is just beginning. My very first event will be my own brother's wedding this August, which feels exactly right. I have been building toward this my whole life without quite knowing it, and I would love for your celebration to be part of where it goes next.
Rivanne is just beginning. My very first event will be my own brother's wedding this August, which feels exactly right. I have been building toward this my whole life without quite knowing it, and I would love for your celebration to be part of where it goes next.