NEW YORK, I LOVE YOU

Before they were the first couple of New York City, they were in love. Photographer KARA McCURDY shares a never-before-seen look at the intimate nuptials between New York mayor Zohran Mamdani and artist Rama Duwaji with ELISE TAYLOR

ELISE TAYLOR

Zohran Mamdani and Rama Duwaji rode the subway during rush hour to their wedding. Kara McCurdy, the photographer who captured their New York City nuptials, thinks about that a lot now: "It's crazy to think if we tried to do this today—because we can't go anywhere with this guy," she says, acknowledging the stratospheric rise of the mayor's public profile. But onto the N and W and then 4 and 5 lines they went on a rainy February morning, Duwaji holding a bouquet that Mamdani got her minutes before from an Astoria flower shop as McCurdy snapped them amid wall-towall morning commuters. "We get onto this really, really, really, really, really, really mobbed train," McCurdy says. "I look up and Rama is just like—goo-goo eyes. Only eyes for Zohran. It felt like just the two of them in the sea of people."

McCurdy first met Mamdani in 2019 at a party for Tiffany Caban's Queens district attorney race. A few months later she began volunteering on his 2020 State Assembly campaign. When the pandemic hit, the Savannah College of Art and Design grad offered to help craft his visual identity: If people couldn't meet the candidate, they could at least see him on social media. "At that point, in March of 2020, there was one single photo that we'd been using for everything: for literature, for media, for pressers, anything. A singular photo," she says, laughing. So she started taking photos of him for his Instagram, where McCurdy estimates he had only around 2,000 followers at the time. (That number soon went up and up: "People love seeing the guy," she says.)

In 2021 Mamdani met Duwaji on the dating app Hinge. " T think I'm going to marry this girl,' " McCurdy remembers the now mayor saying during a run in 2022 in Rainey Park. The remark surprised her: Mamdani was always talking to her about his love of romantic comedies and their meet-cutes. "Do you really think that your love story can start on an app?" she asked. "It's not even about the app, Kara," he said. "You have to meet this girl."

"This man was just so down bad from the very beginning," she says. "Itwas really cute." (The mayor himself did not respond to requests for comment.)

"IT FELT LIKE JUST THE TWO OF THEM IN THE SEA OF PEOPLE."

In the winter of 2025—in the throes of his mayoral campaign—Mamdani asked McCurdy to photograph their intimate wedding at the City Clerk's Office. They arrived for their morning appointment and afterward went for buns at Nice One Bakery on Bayard Street. "Itwas just really nice because nobody knew them at the time. So they had this gorgeous private day to themselves. It was raining, so there weren't a lot of people out and about."

On May 12, Mamdani and Duwaji publicly announced their marriage like most millennial couples do: via a photo dump on Instagram. But unlike most millennial couples' posts—captioned with their wedding date or a cliché like "I married my best friend"—Mamdani's post got political. "Three months ago I married the love of my life, Rama, at the City Clerk's office. Now, right-wing trolls are trying to make this race—which should be about you—about her," he wrote after internet commentators claimed Mamdani was hiding his significant other while campaigning. "Rama isn't just my wife, she's an incredible artist who deserves to be known on her own terms."

Shortly before and after his November 4 victory, many people on the internet took a more celebratory, even comical, tone. Some writers latched on to the improbable way they met: "Zohran Mamdani and Rama Duwaji Are Making Finding Love on Hinge Seem Possible Again," read a headline in Vogue. "Zohran Mamdani Could Make History (as the First NYC Mayor to Meet His Wife on Hinge)," read another in Cosmopolitan. "This can't be the same Hinge Zohran met his wife on," said one of many viral tweets. Others noted the alternative wedding look worn by Duwaji: a short lace dress, knee-high black boots, and a brown duster jacket. Some just focused on the bride herself: "Congratulations to the hot husband of Rama Duwaji," one user posted. Another posted that their low-key clerk's office ceremony had become an aspirational aesthetic unto itself: "Obsessed w Zohran being the mayor of wedding photography pinterest," one social media user wrote, sharing Pinterest screenshots of McCurdy's images.

McCurdy says that the couple's willingness to share their intimate photos signals Mamdani's sincere desire to interact with the public. "These photos—they offer us a sort of authenticity that is so lacking," she says.