About Me - Cade Lulow Photos

Hi, I’m Cade.

I’m a portrait photographer based in Cheyenne, Wyoming, Growing up in small-town Wyoming, I think I became fascinated with the things most people learn to overlook. There is so much space here. Miles of open road, fields that seem to stretch forever, little towns scattered across an otherwise enormous landscape. From a distance, it can feel sparse—almost empty. But I never really saw it that way.

I found stories in abandoned buildings. In the peeling paint of an old wall. In the little nooks and forgotten corners of places that had been left behind. I would wonder who had been there before me, what those rooms had once meant to someone, what conversations had happened inside them, what lives had passed through and eventually moved on. There was something about finding evidence of a life inside a place that appeared to have nothing left to say that always captivated me.

Maybe that's where I learned how to look.

My mom used to tell me I had the craziest imagination, and honestly, I don’t think much has changed.

I still find myself constantly creating little worlds in my head, noticing the strange and beautiful things happening around me, and looking for ways to turn the things I feel into something tangible.

I’m queer, I love the arts, I love music, I love film, I love pop culture, and I think all of those things have shaped the way I see. My love for photography actually began with filmmaking. I was drawn to the idea of building a world, following a character, finding meaning in the smallest details, and telling a story that could make someone feel something they hadn’t expected to feel. Eventually, I found a camera and realized I could do much of the same thing with a single frame.

Since then, my goal has always been to document the stories happening around me with honesty and integrity. I want to make photographs that feel like more than photographs—to create images that hold a little bit of the person, the place, and the moment they came from. I’m interested the tenderness, the messiness, the humor, the intimacy, the contradictions, and all of the little pieces of ourselves that make us human.

More than anything, I want the people I photograph to feel welcome. I want you to be able to show up exactly as you are, without feeling like you need to perform for my camera. I want to photograph the parts of you that you love, the parts you're still learning to love, and maybe even the parts you've never really known how to see before. There is something incredibly special about being trusted with someone's vulnerability, and I don't take that trust lightly.

I think photography can be a kind of offering. A way of saying, I see you. I was here. This mattered. And if I'm lucky, I get to give someone a photograph that allows them to see themselves from a perspective they may have never considered before.

So whether I'm photographing a portrait, a wedding, a quiet afternoon, or some fleeting little piece of your life, I want to tell the story honestly. I want there to be room for you to be weird, sentimental, loud, quiet, romantic, imperfect, completely yourself. I want to make photographs that feel lived in rather than manufactured.

I’m still that kid with the wild imagination, I just have a camera now.