June 19, 2008 Issue                                       

©2007 The Chestnut Hill Local

Candace clicks with class
From Hawaii to Mt. Airy, with love (and weddings)
by PAMELA ROGOW

Candace and Virginia obviously love their work — and who wouldn’t on the beaches of Hawaii?

The talent pool that is Northwest Philly got notably deeper this season when Virginia St. Claire and Candace Freeland decided to leave the slice of nirvana they created in Kauai behind and join family members now in Mt. Airy.

Virginia, 62 and Candace, 55, are a striking couple with remarkable talents. During their nine years in Hawaii, they created a legacy…a piece of which they will be importing to Philadelphia.

To say that Virginia does spiritual counseling or that Candace is a wedding and portrait photographer does not do justice to their accomplishments. In Hawaii, they created a home — an estate, really — on three acres that combines bed-and-breakfast, wedding services, pre-nuptial and pastoral counseling and wedding photography. They and their team perform about 100 weddings and commitment ceremonies each year. About 25 percent are commitment ceremonies with same-sex couples.

The weddings are always outdoors, and the photography is invariably gorgeous.

“We moved to Hawaii to fulfill a dream of mine, to swim in natural warm water 365 days a year,” Virginia recalled recently. “When we got there, I wrote a novel, and Candace focused at first on music. She studied marimba and vibraphone with the head percussionist of the Honolulu symphony.

“We got a nesting impulse, so we bought a house, ‘Hale Pueo’ which means ‘House of the Owl;’ the pueo is an ancestral guardian spirit in Hawaiian folklore.” The house, on Oahu, overlooked Lanikai, a beach that Conde Nast has time and again named the best in the U.S. "Buying it was a stretch, which was resolved in part by creating a magical bed-and-breakfast retreat for visitors from around the world,” Virginia says.

The newlyweds’ suit and wedding dress are going to get rather wet, but who cares? They’re in Hawaii.

Virginia earned a master’s degree in divinity from the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley in ’76 and then served as a hospital chaplain, spiritual director and pastoral counselor. In Hawaii, she began her spiritual counseling practice. Although raised and educated in the Christian tradition, her life experience has led her to honor diverse spiritual paths. Her first counseling 'office' was under the ironwood trees in Kailua Beach Park. One day a client asked her, "Would you officiate at my friend's wedding?"

“That motivated me to get a license to legally perform weddings in the state of Hawaii," she explains.

Soon Virginia asked Candace if she would like to dust off her cameras and join her in creating a wedding business. That business has flourished for the past nine years.

Photography had been a part of Candace’s life since 1968 when she convinced her parents to move from Raleigh, North Carolina, to Berkeley. From almost the moment Candace enrolled at Berkeley High School, she clicked with photography. Within two weeks, the photography teacher asked her to lead the student lab. She was on site for the People’s Park protests and the great shifts going on in San Francisco, and saw her work published in national magazines. She and the renowned photographer, Eugene Smith, worked together on a photo essay for Scholastic Magazine about impoverished blacks in the South.

Leah and Jarod are so adorable that Candace has taken loads of photos of them

After high school, Candace joined the Quaker-organized Venceremos Brigade: 700 people took a cattle barge from Canada to Cuba.

She went, expecting to cut sugar cane and provide Life magazine with images; the publication had provided her with several hundred rolls of film. But one night, she was asked by compadres to a private meeting in a hut in the country. “They asked me not to publish the photographs I was taking. They said, with what is going on in the U.S., we know these photographs could be twisted and misconstrued. I agreed not to submit them to Life, after all, but my photos were later published in Ramparts magazine, the Mother Jones of the ‘70s."

Soon after her sojourn to revolutionary Cuba, Candace began a more spiritual quest leading to a seven-year stretch in ashrams in Colorado, Seattle and Miami. She put down her cameras at that point, worked as something of a house mother and joined a trio. “Candace can play any instrument she picks up,” Virginia says. The Morning Glory Trio featured Candace on the guitar and vocals.

In the following years, she worked as a photojournalist for the Associated Press in Boston, the award-winning Maine newspaper, The Biddeford Journal-Tribune; and then for The Providence Journal-Bulletin and The Charlotte Observer.

About 25 percent of the ceremonies that Virginia conducts are commitment ceremonies for gay couples who come from all over the country.

In 1987, Candace took a leave of absence from the Observer to document a Witness for Peace delegation's trip to war-torn Nicaragua. She ended up free-lancing there for two years; her work was published in U.S. News and World Report and The New York Times, among others. On her return, the Light Factory, a prominent southeastern photography gallery, exhibited her one-person show, "Images from Nicaragua.”

Candace’s future was to include commercial work for the likes of IBM and Duke Energy. In 1997, Candace and Virginia met in Fairfield, Iowa, home to a creative spiritual community inspired by Transcendental Meditation. Virginia’s four children were by then grown and thriving, and the couple moved to Asheville, forming  Earthsong Productions, a world music production company. “Hundreds of people came to our events in Asheville,” Candace reports. “The goal was to make village life available to everyone in our community. We produced dances with live drum and marimba ensembles and presented a concert with a world-renowned Nigerian drummer and spiritual teacher who also led a weekend African Village Retreat for participants interested in exploring African cultural traditions."

The committed partners have always worked together, even if it is simply a kind of professional parallel play. "We each have our own studio space and enjoy the interplay of our creative enterprises."

Candace brings the combined experience of her years as a photojournalist and Hawaiian wedding photographer to Philadelphia. She is now focusing on documenting what she calls “the magical moments and emotions of children, families and weddings in natural outdoor settings.”

Virginia, who is also an impressive visual artist, has been building her spiritual counseling practice. “A counseling session is a creative act, just as writing and painting are for me. I begin every session with a silent prayer asking to be a channel of peace and wisdom. My first goal in working with clients is to support them in acknowledging their own beauty and integrity." 

Virginia and Candace were both drawn to Philadelphia to be nearer to their families. The couple’s local draw is Virginia's daughter, Claire, 31, and her partner, Matthew, and son, Leo, 4, who live in Mt. Airy. Virginia's two other daughters, Deidre, 42, and Frances, 28, live in Morristown, NJ, and in San Francisco, respectively; her son, Jonathan, 41, lives in Germany. Candace's family live in Charlottesville, North Carolina, and Atlanta, all an easy travel distance on Amtrak. 

“We came here for all the right reasons,” Virginia says. “This is a great hub for seeing more of our growing families.” 

And we can presume, for sharing their gifts of celebration, counseling and photography to many of us here as well.

For more information, contact Candace at 215-242-0448, or visit www.bluepearlimages.com; or contact Virginia at 215-242-0448, or visit Inheaven1@mac.com.