Alaska Pride Conference 2012 kicks off on October 5 with a First Friday showing at Tref.Punkt Studio of Love is Love, a photographic exhibit of LGBT couples from across the state.

Love is Love is a project that believes just that, and Mitch Kitter and Shalem Mathew of Treft.Punkt Studio aim to capture the vibrancy that is Alaska’s LGBT community. They’ve been working on a portrait project at their studio the last six months photographing LGBT couples of all shapes, sizes, and colors to help show how “Love is Love”.

Treft.Punkt’s First Friday event — which also serves as the kickoff event of Alaska Pride Conference 2012 —  features vignettes of all of the incredible couples they’ve had the pleasure to work with over the past few months. The project began, Kitter and Mathew told KTVA Channel 11 News, after a lesbian couple told them they couldn’t find a portrait photographer willing to photograph them:

“We thought it was awful,” said Mathew. “To go through something like that would be terrible. So we posted Love is Love on Facebook and it was kind of a roller coaster from there.”

Originally intending to work with five to ten Anchorage couples for the shoot, Kitter and Mathew ended up instead with 28 couples from all over the state — and now they plan to expand the project further.

Gayle Schuh and Julie Schmidt are one couple featured in Love is Love. Gayle and Julie met 35 years ago, in the mid-1970s —

“We met in the Midwest, playing softball, and I always say how stereotypically lesbian is that,” Schuh laughed.

— and were married in Canada five years ago — a marriage not legally recognized in Alaska, which passed a constitutional amendment in 1998 establishing marriage as being only between “one man and one woman,” the first of 28 states to pass such a popular referendum.  Marriage equality is on the ballot in four states this November — Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, and Washington — and hopes are high that in at least some of these states, marriage equality will finally win.

Meanwhile, life goes on for Gayle and Julie:

“We all get up, brush our teeth, and walk the dog, and shop for groceries and wash the dishes,” said Schuh. “Our lives are as mundane as everybody else’s.”

But judging from the photos, their love is anything but mundane. Watch the full story on KTVA — and come out to Treft.Punkt Studio to see Gayle and Julie and all the other loving couples being celebrated there tonight and throughout the month.

• Date/time: Friday, October 5, 6:00 to 9:00 PM
• Location: Treft.Punkt Studio, 245 West 5th Avenue, Anchorage (see map)
• Further info: see Facebook events page, or the Love is Love Facebook page